


Hic Sunt Dracones [Here be Dragons]

by DarkAthena (seraphim_grace)



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Accidental classics acquisition, Body Horror, Discussions of mental illness, H rider haggard would be horrified, I accidentally rewrote she, M/M, NaNoWriMo, Or seen the film, The best bit is I hadn't actually read the book, after the first date it didn't like lovecraft as a person, celtic mythology - Freeform, flirts with hp lovecraft, flirts with the lovecraftian mythos, scenes of horror, teen wolf sga xover because, void doesn't play well with others, void is an ancient, void is balor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:41:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27591503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/DarkAthena
Summary: The SGC seeing something valuable in Stiles' Possession send him to Atlantis where a rogue group take him from them. Eight months later Stiles returns with no memory of where he was and what he did, convinced he was only gone a few days. It's up to Atlantis to find out what happened in his absence and if they can stop it happening again.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 19
Kudos: 63





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a nano which means it's a mess, its unedited, subject to change, weird tangents and has chunks missing where I cut them or added where something didn't make sense [but they still count for wordcount]  
> but I'm not feeling it, and it might be November madness or just plain writers fatigue so I need more eyes so I'm sharing where I was going to wait until it was finished.  
> It's ponderous and dark and I'm adding the chapter with all the exposition that I cut because it absolutely 100% didn't fit with the tone at the end.
> 
> Be honest, this is a WIP and it will take turns depending on audience feedback

Warnings: Stargate Atlantis crossover, Murder Death kills, Void goes on a rampage in spaaaaaace, NANO

  
“ _Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"_  
Arthur C Clarke 1962

\---  
Mid 2015

Derek got up from where he was kneeling, repotting a _Camellia Sinensis_ , and brushed loose soil from his pants so that he could attend the daily briefing. On the way to the main conference room, Dr Zelenka fell into step with him, offering a polite hello but Derek didn't really know the man. Stiles had said that he looked like a squirrel strung out on coffee and he had been one of the most welcoming of the pair of them to the equipment labs. Barring a crisis in the city, the third day was the science briefing and invariably it was word of how Stiles was still missing usually with word from another planet that they hadn't seen him.

Woolsey had insisted that Derek start attending sessions with Dr Bello as the third month fell into the fourth and it became apparent that Derek was not coping at all. By the fifth month, people started ducking down corridors to avoid him because he was clearly not doing well.

After the sixth month, Dr Beckett called him into the infirmary to make sure he ate at least one meal a day.

It had been eight months and in that time Derek had planted a garden in an abandoned room with a glass roof that had been one of the doors that Stiles had opened. "This was a plaza," he said, "a place to watch the weather. It was functional, tracking pressure variations but hardly anyone came here," he had spread his fingers over a bench set into a large planter with a dead plant that sprawled over the stonework with dead vines and leaves that shattered at his touch that sprawled over the stonework, "they were too arrogant to take the time to just look," he had sat on the bench, sprawled and staring at the sky, "look," and the sky above them had been streaked with meteors burning up in the atmosphere's surface. "Make a wish," Derek had said and Stiles had laughed.

With him missing Derek had worked to restore the plaza, but with practical plants- medicinal herbs supplied by Teyla and Ronon that grew natively but had striking appearances or heavy blossoms, an apothecary rose that didn't need nearly the care that Derek had read about, but thrived on old coffee grounds. There were two coffee trees, an _Arabicas_ and a _Robusta_ , that the physics department had supplied, sacrificing precious space on the Daedalus to bring them for Derek's garden. Occasionally the botanists would stop by with suggestions but most people came to the plaza to sit and read quietly in the shade of a blossoming shrub or maybe eat a late lunch, a pastry scrounged from the mess in their hands as they took the time amongst plants to decompress from the stress of their jobs. 

"You were in Antartica, yes?" Zelenka asked as they rode the elevator up to the higher floors together. Zelenka wore tiny rimmed glasses, which combined with light brown hair six months past cutting, gave him a look of perpetual surprise. As far as Derek could tell he shaved every other day, so he had more time for his work which seemed to be mollifying Dr McKay as much as managing the city, but he had round puffy cheeks which did make him look like a paranoid squirrel, still he had not wanted to poke and prod Derek like most of the other chief scientists in the city.

"Only for a few weeks," Derek answered. The SGC had moved the two of there to get them away from Dr Jackson before deciding putting Stiles near all that ancient tech, on Earth no less, was a bad idea and they had been sent to Atlantis. 

"Two years," Zelenka offered, "two years longer to get the cold from my toes." It was a joke offered to ease the mood in the elevator, which fast as it was always seemed to take longer when the people had nothing to say to each other, and as the months flew by it fewer people had things to say to Derek. "I hear you got the reactor core open," he said, "no ZPM McKay says, so he does not care," Zelenka had a thick Czech accent and the patience of a saint to deal with McKay day in and day out because the chief scientist was brilliant but far too excitable for Derek. Luckily he had no interest in Derek other than the person who accompanied Stiles when they wanted him to turn on ancient gadgets and ignore what they were told about them. "You remember what it looks like?" he said, "when it was on, I have video from Antartic team but not the same, is off for one thing, and I am too valuable to Atlantis to go see in person," without Zelenka mollifying McKay and Sheppard taking him offworld someone would have "accidentally" pushed him off a pier. Even with him mollified Derek had considered doing it himself.

  
"We talk, later," Zelenka said as the doors opened, "I have questions, we might recreate the technology, possibly ease the cities reliance on the ZPM network."

Derek made a noise of assent before he said, "I'll be in my garden," it was where he spent as much time as he could, between basic, where he worked out with the marines in a regime worked out by Ronon, meals and sleep, he was in his garden. It was where he felt closest to Stiles. Zelenka was still talking about the ZPM when Derek opened the door to the conference room where they would hold their daily briefings. Derek being there was a formality, it was Sheppard's way to reassuring him that they were looking, that every away team asked about missing people, people snatched from settlements never to return, if they knew anything about that happening, even legends of it happening elsewhere- because the trail had run cold within an hour of him vanishing. 

"Could it have been voluntary?" Woolsey had asked, leaning forward on his desk with his tablet in front of him. "could he have run away?"

Derek had snorted out a laugh, "read his file and tell me it was voluntary," Derek had said, "if it had been voluntary, he would have taken me too."

Lorne had answered the question more politely, that there had been signs of a struggle at the campsite, that they had heard tales of people going missing but had either ascribed it to wraith attacks or wild animals. Most of Pegasus was pre-industrial and so there was a chance that kids that vanished were taken by predators, native to their planet or alien, but the evidence where Stiles was taken was unclear. 

Derek had been able to track him but the trail led to the gate which had recently been opened. No one on the team had been able to even suggest that they read the gate's buffer and by the time someone was able to the data had been overwritten by their own travels.

It had been a translation jaunt, visiting an uninhabited planet to see if Stiles could read some of the panels on the walls. Everything was videoed, Stiles opened a hitherto unknown panel, a radio broadcast to Atlantis advised the party to stay overnight to correctly document the new parts of the temple compound, Stiles had gone into the bushes to relieve himself and then he was gone.

Sheppard had arranged a search team and for six days they had pulled the planet apart looking for him, even using explosives on part of the temple complex where a map, drawn by one of the anthropologists with a laser measurer and ruler, suggested a hidden room, for any evidence as to who or what had taken him from the camp. They had taken him through the gate but the team didn't trust Derek's sense of smell. They had to have evidence. So Derek returned to the city and waited for word.

And waited.

And waited.

It had been eight months and every day Derek came into the conference room that overlooked the gate room and sat at the table and listened to them say they hadn't found anything new. Some days new people were listed as missing and their coordinates put on a starmap that he filled out diligently, hoping for some kind of pattern but not finding one.

Eight months of McKay complaining about his scientists who were all incompetent morons if he was to be believed.

Eight months of Lorne's recitation of remaining munitions.

Eight months of Teyla giving the news of the Athosian growth cycles and how their hunting and fishing had gone and how much would be allotted to the city. 

Eight months of the day to day management of a scientific outpost in a galaxy he did not belong in so that they could tell him what he already knew - that they hadn't found Stiles.

Derek would know if he was dead. It was both the only thing keeping him going and the only thing keeping him in Atlantis.

Stiles would return, he was sure of it, and Derek had to be there when it happened.

Dr Beckett was telling Sheppard about the new strain of flu like symptoms going through the Athosians and how he and Doctor Keller were working hard on a vaccine because it would certainly rip through the city and although not particulary dangerous it was unpleasant enough to incapacitate people for a day or seven. Derek didn't care about it because it wouldn't affect him; he had proved as immune to Pegasus viruses as Earth ones.

Teyla was assuring them that this was not uncommon and that her Torvath tea, which smelled like old gym socks, was more than capable of managing the symptoms.

Derek just sat in his chair and waited whilst Dr Beckett insisted that they were not being a bother in seeking medical help and the more knowledge that he had would make it easier to treat illness in the future. It was, Derek knew, only with illnesses that Teyla insisted that they could manage, because for centuries they had and the doctors that had come from earth were more suited for combat situations, being battlefield trauma surgeons, rather than general practitioners who knew their way around influenza and similar viruses.

Zelenka winked at Derek and slid him a cup of tea, it was one of Teyla's herbal teas but smelled drinkable.

Derek hadn't told them what to look for, the one thing that would absolutely tell them where Stiles was - without Derek there would be no Stiles, there would be Balor and Balor would start slaughters, wars, havoc and chaos. There had been nothing of that, or if there had no one had told Atlantis.

Instead there was minutae and bickering and bizarre pink tea that tasted of aniseed and smelled of cinnamon and Sheppard's laconic noises of assent and McKay's explosive tantrums.

Derek sat there because he needed to be there in case there was any news, and he thought he knew what to listen for, things like massacres, as well as missing young people but years of wraith predations had kept the populations small and used to loss. A missing youth was mourned and their tasks given to someone else because a pair of hands was often as valuable as the person had been.

Sometimes Sheppard asked if there was anything he wanted to contribute, usually to the provisions coming in on the Daedalus and then for his garden, but mostly he was just a body in a seat just in case someone had heard something.

They never did.

Around the fourth month, when even the marines with the promise of no man left behind started to tire in their search and their questions got more by rote than interest Derek started hearing Stiles behind him, with the terrible, arcane knowledge that if he turned aroudn to look Stiles owuld not be there. He would be there when Derek hovered on the edge of sleep and awakening, a warmth and weight in the bed they shared and the feel of his breath against the back of Derek's neck, but if Derek ever turned the bed would be empty. 

Sometimes he heard him laughing, out of sight down the endless corridors of the city.

He didn't tell the doctors. They wouldn't have believed him; they would have said it was his way of dealing with the grief; but they didn't understand. he was pretty sure none of them had read Stiles' file, the one that explained what was between them and Dr McKay had been sitting in a briefing just like the one they were in now, with Derek and Stiles sat on a bench outside holding hands as Derek repeated what they said. "Th'y'la!" McKay had erupted, "that's from Star Trek!"

Teal'c, who had travelled with them on the Daedalus as their ambassador and guard because he enjoyed the peace of the months long journey and used it as a sort of working vacation whilst most of the passengers used it as troop transport, sharing bunks in shifts and playing card games and being generally rowdy, had been calm and said "that was what Dr Lee said too. Daniel Jackson explained that he did not have a word for what it was that they shared and so he chose th'y'la for it was the closest word that he could find."

They shaped their understanding around the word and the word was wrong but it was the only word that they had.

Stiles was part of his soul and his soul was part of Stiles and they were bound in a way that Derek himself could not understand, and it was necessary and terrible and Derek knew that Stiles was alive, even though the Atlantis expedition were sure that he must be dead, because Derek was still alive. If Stiles died then Derek would die, so whilst Derek lived Stiles lived, even if it was just a halflife without him.

The Atlantis expedition accepted their files with the promise to read them, listened to Teal'c's explanation of their unique circumstances but only heard how Stiles could read ancient fluently, and how his ATA gene was greater even than Sheppard's - and Sheppard could not have missed how the city sang for the two of them - and why they had been sent to Antartica and why they thought they'd be more useful in Atlantis. They heard how Stiles and Derek were not to be parted but they didn't hear why because they had their own minds made up as to why.

They were people of science - and maybe there was science in what existed between them but it was beyond what they understood. 

The Atlantis expedition thought that they understood so they didn't question, and they certainly didnt understand. 

As far as they understood Derek hadn't lost the other half of his soul, literally, but his life partner and so he spent time every week with Dr Bello who kept trying to ease him through the five stages of grief. She meant well, but she was wrong.

Derek didn't mourn Stiles because Stiles wasn't dead. Stiles was somewhere else and also here, in a laugh behind Derek, in the weight of him in their bed, in the heat of him behind Derek in the shower, and unlike Orpheus if Derek turned around to look he would not even catch a glimpse.

Stiles would make a joke to lighten the mood for Derek, sometimes tasteless but almost always funny. Derek would roll his eyes to let him know he had heard and couldn't laugh, and they would butt shoulders and Stiles would struggle to stifle a laugh and McKay would glare at them, interrupted from his histrionic monologuing and Sheppard would smile and shake his head and Lorne would sigh and try to bring the meeting back on track.

Derek missed him, but he had not lost him - he had been taken and those who had taken him would suffer, so where the Expedition looked for a missing young man, Derek looked for the aftermath. 

The Expedition didn't understand Balor. Derek could not blame them - until they had experienced it it sounded like a fairy tale. They could accomodate a young man knowing how to read Ancient, or as he called it Fomorian, but the idea that the reason he knew it was a slumbering demon that might, at any moment, slaughter all of them, was either ignored or dismissed as superstitious nonsense.

After Antartica he thought that they would listen.

They didn't, they just moved them to Atlantis where they assumed they knew what was going on and then Stiles was taken and it was clear that they didn't.

So Derek attended the daily briefings when the time might be better spent in his garden. 

"Unscheduled Offworld Activation" the klaxon sounded through the gate room loud enough that the conference room echoed with the sound of it, a woman's voice repeating over and over Unscheduled Offworld Activation.

Sheppard was out of his chair in a flash, with Lorne falling quickly into step out of the doors and across the mezzanine to the stairs as the marines who were on duty, who mostly did crosswords to pass the time, snapped to attention, raising their P90s and aimed them at the iris as it opened.

Derek felt the surge of power, strong enough that he had to slam his hands on the table to support himself, his eyes flaring blue and his fangs pushing down past his teeth, the ridges of his face pushing his brows up and his ears back. It was like a plug slipped into a socket or something changed with a fresh battery. Like he had been half alive and now he was made of electricity and he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise like hackles. Half transformed he was faster and stronger than the marines so he pushed past them, toppling them like dominoes. 

The marines reacted in a primal manner, fear and instinct causing them to draw back from the apex predator in their midst, a man that they had made comments about behind his back where they thought that he wouldn't hear, now realising that they had made a mistake but Derek didn't care. Even Sheppard took a step backwards as his animal brain realised how dangerous that Derek was. 

Derek caught the figure as it fell through the gate, the skin of his arms pressing against the normally loose fabric of his jacket as his muscles bulked in mid transformation and Stiles looked up, with eyes like black olives, and gave a tired smile, "you cut your hair," he said and fell forward into Derek's arms, unconscious.

Derek swallowed back his wolf, as he swung Stiles up into his arms in a princess carry. "Page Dr Beckett," Sheppard ordered.

"I'll take him," Derek said, lisping through his teeth. There was a compulsion there, a need to keep Stiles in his arms, skin to skin at wrist and where Stiles' face was tucked into his neck. Derek could hear the marines muttering, "what the fuck" before Ronon ushered them back into readiness and the gate closed with a whoosh, and the metalic scratching of the iris closing.

"No," Sheppard said, "you're goign to sit and wait for Dr Beckett," he was being firm with his hand on Derek's arm, "in case something's wrong that could be jostled." 

Derek couldn't help it, he growled, low and deep in his throat and despite his training and his general lackadaisical response to threats Sheppard swallowed before he continued, "you don't have to let him go," his voice was aimed to calm Derek and Derek wondered if he had seen him transformed before or it was just the photos in his file, because he didn't seem as surprised as the others were, "just wait, Dr Beckett will be here soon."

"I can smell blood," Derek said, "old, its almost ground into his skin."

Sheppard nodded slowly, treating Derek like he had shock, like he was the one who had been held captive for eight months, and it had to have been like that or Stiles owuld have come back to him, "can you smell anything else?"

The clothes Stiles was wearing were not what he had been wearing when he vanished, he was wearing wool worn thin and haggard but they were richly embroidered and had been beautiful once, they were stiff with dirt and ominous dark stains that smelled acrid like amonia, and there was a metallic copper smell that was neither copper nor blood, but it was hard to track it under the layers of old sweat and something swampy.

There was another set of smells, ones he couldn't place and tried to separate, taking great loud breaths through his nose, there was something like warm caramel, sour milk, oatmeal. His hearing was overwhelmed, he was overwhelmed, focussing on the steady thrum of Stiles' heart until it was all that he could focus on, the smells of him, rank and foetid, with that warm caramel sweetness underneath it. There was a verdant green smell, like the algae that formed on river stones and something in his hair not unlike fruit. He didn't recognise the smells and said so.

Derek could not smell fear on him, just something he thought might be triumph.

Balor had been in control and that meant wherever he had been he had destroyed and he had had months to do it.

\---

Carson Beckett was probably Derek's favourite member of the Atlantis Expedition. He was overqualified, over experienced and treated Derek with a cup of tea with a nip of whiskey no matter what the problem was. 

He had taken the time to read both of their files whilst checking for medical things that he felt he should have on his patient flashcards which he kept for his staff, Brandi, Andi, Candi and Doug. Three of those looked like someone's fetishistic view of a nurse in a 1950's sitcom and the other one was Doug, someone Sheppard affectionately called an "autopsy gremlin". 

Doug was their pathology nurse and Derek's heart sunk when Carson asked for his help with preparing Stiles. Andi was told to put the kettle on, that's a love, and Candi to get a fresh pair of scrubs, like a good wee lass, and Doug was told to get his kit.

There were only two reasons that Doug was told to get his kit, one was a death and the other was a sexual assault in order to get forensic evidence.

Derek didn't know if this was standard procedure but he wanted to step away, to tell them to stop, that Stiles wasn't dead, and if he had been hurt hadn't he been hurt enough? 

Yet Derek put him down on the plastic tray thatt Carson had hung over the medical bed and stepped back. The tray was used for autopsies and allowed them to gather all the particulates a body brought back and allowed for easy clean up.

"Hold his hand," Carson said. Sheppard had once said that Carson was too kind to have reasonably survived in Atlantis, which is probably why he had died and been replaced with a clone, but Derek trusted him more than Dr Keller who had a cold dispassion that made her feel distant, like they were lab experiments to her. She had looked eager when she had read Derek's file, with him sitting facing her and Carson had gone, no, I'll take care of this one because he recognised something in Derek that needed coddling. He trusted that Derek knew how his body worked and kept his scalpels to himself.

Stiles' hand was cold in Derek's as Carson and Doug worked to undress him.

Doug had a pair of medical scissors and handed them to Carson as he started to comb through Stiles' hair. They were so careful of him as they unpinned the brooch that held the cape over his shoulders. They would later take screenshots of the security footage to show how it was worn, but the city, singing with joy at the return of her citizen, would record everything they did.

They would catalogue everything and they wanted Derek to watch.

The cape was peeled from his shoulders, it was stiff with dirt and grim stains, but there was a pattern woven into the fabric and it might have been green. As Carson pulled it off Doug bagged it and scribbled the time and date on the label.

The procedure was repeated for his belt. 

Stiles was wearing a knee length tunic that was as detailed as the cape and Carson just cut straight through the collar and peeled it apart and revealed the thing that Derek had smelled that was like warm caramel and sour milk. He was wearing a sling, something not entirely unlike a papoose, curled around his front so that an infant could be held there.

The baby, and there was one, was sleeping, thumb in mouth and only a few months old, not young enough that she could have been Stiles' own but she had been born during his absence. Carson eased her out of the sling, only cutting one of the straps, although it looked like it might disintegrate with the slightest pressure, and passed her to Andi when she brought over the pot of tea telling her to take care of this wee poppet.

Carson seemed unperturbed by Stiles having a small, black, baby strapped to his chest and Derek's brain was not worked correctly because it was screaming STILES STILES STILES and he was still wolfed out and taking the baby would have meant letting go of Stiles' hand and he wasn't ready to do that yet, if ever.

They cleaned Stiles like he was a body, his vitals registering on a screen next to them as they added nutrient lines and the city, determined to please Carson, whose ATA gene was strong, who was looking after Stiles whose was stronger. They then took him from the plastic tray and quickly dressing him in the scrubs tucked him into another of the medical beds, all the while not taking his hand from Derek's. 

Doug had washed his hair and pulled dirt from his finger and toe nails, and clipped away eight months of facial hair, but it was only when he was tucked in that they shaved him, having taken all the evidence that they could. 

Then Carson gave Derek a cup of tea, thick with sugar, which was used for shock, and a wee nip of whiskey for what ails you, and told him it was up to Stiles now.

Andi dealt with the baby, because Derek couldn't focus enough. She called Teyla about finding a home for it, because the city was no place for a baby, even if Teyla's own had grown up here, and she called Carson over to look for something, and Derek imagined it might have been the same as he had seen when Stiles was naked, the livid imprint of a hand on his chest where a wraith had fed on him.

\----

Sheppard surprised Derek by asking Carson for his briefing on Stiles' condition with Derek present. They did it by Stiles' bedside and Carson explained what Sheppard probably realised. The only evidence that they had as to where he was was what he had brought back with him.

Sheppard had sent word from Teyla that she might have issues rehoming the child because it had been wraithfed and many peoples thought it was a poor omen and would bring evil on the village or homestead. Teyla thought that this was nonsense, of course, but she understood that superstition was something that motivated the peoples of the Pegasus Galaxy, but McKay had had a tantrum about it because of course he did. He hated any kind of superstition because he was a man of science to his very core.

Stiles' bloodwork showed no instance of the wraith enzyme, and certainly no form of addiction. The handprint on his chest looked to be several months old and the nail punctures at the end of each finger were healed and formed dark pink scar tissue. There were other bruises, some shaped like fingers, and a non-mobile fracture of his left arm, which Beckett was printing a cast off for just to give it a hand. His knuckles were scraped but that was nowhere near the weirdest part.

On his right arm, on the inside of his wrist was a small disk with a band that wrapped aorund the arm like a watch, but it seemed to be inset into the skin, and it had a variant of the DHD carved into it. It looked to be, and Derek wasn't an expert - comapred to most of the people on the expedition he was a loose wheel used for muscle and left to his own devices because no one knew what to do with him where Stiles was valuable and Stiles needed him - a remote dialing device for the stargate.

More than anything it cemented something for Derek, Balor had been in control and Balor had rescued the child, which meant that whatever had thretened the baby had pissed off the ancient. 

When Stiles had first been possessed, back before they knew what it was that had ridden his body without the magic to hold him back, they had thought it was a nogitsune and Balor's spite was one of the reasons they had made the mistake. Balor gloried in carnage. When he was crossed he was relentless. Back then they had called him Void. 

If Balor saved the child it was because it spited the wraith that crossed him.

Balor might have been Ancient force of malevolence, but he was a predictable one.


	2. Chapter 2

Stiles first word upon waking, still in the infirmary hooked up to nutrient tubes supplied by the city, was Oudra which it took Derek a moment to realise might be the name of the baby he had carried through the gate with him.

He blinked owlishly at Derek, gave a tiny hint of a smile, and fell back to sleep, his breath evening and his blood pressure calming on the screens behind him. Stiles had been rolled, by Doug, into the recovery position to allow the city's electrodes and scans to access his back and his hand was curled in front of his face and Derek, sat in the chair beside the bed, took it in his own. 

More than anything he wanted to curl up in that bed beside Stiles, to fit Stiles into the hollows he made with his body, his arms wrapped tight so no one could take Stiles from him again. 

There were times that Derek could not tell the difference between his wolf instincts and his human ones. He was not so naive to think that the two were different but sometimes the wolf was more clear with it's more primal needs as opposed to the man's more ordered ones. At that moment he was aware of both, the wolf's need to take its mate back to its den and protect with teeth that which he held most precious, and the man who wanted them to bend Heaven and Earth to keep Stiles safe knowing he could not do it alone.

The wolf wanted to snap at Dr Beckett and Brandi when they came by to check the machines- to adjust the blankets and tap the tube from the drips and make pleased sounding noises- but the human wanted them to work faster, to use those alien machines to make it all better NOW.

There was a tray of food and the sweet _heiscuil_ tea that Stiles liked so much but until he woke of his own accord it was best to let him sleep. "The body heals in sleep, lad," Dr Beckett said in that fond tone that never sounded patronising. His accent allowed him to be strangely paternal and Derek yielded to him in a way he didn't for the other commanders of the expedition. Sheppard was wry and sarcastic. McKay was loud and neurotic. No one listened to Woolsey who was there to appease the IOA and Lorne managed the day to day. 

Derek had no appetite and the smell of the tea made him feel a little nauseous. 

Intellectually he knew that it was nerves, that his worry over Stiles was cresting after eight months of nothingness, both in news and emotion, and wondered if he would be sick. He didn't want to because it would mean leaving Stiles as he slept. He never wanted to let Stiles out of his sight again.

"He needs another blanket," Derek said as Brandi fussed with the tubing and hung another bag on the drip, "he feels the cold." The Antarctic cold had seeped into his bones and never seemed to thaw.

"I'll get you one, hun'," she said with a beaming grin. She was a slim woman with bleached blonde hair cut short to her scalp with only a little length on the top. When she was off duty although she was usually in her official scrubs but added a pair of distinctive earrings that were an acorn and leaf that hung at her jawline. She had capable hands with short nails and despite her friendly manner and a beaming smile she was, like most of the original members of the expedition, determined and not easily disturbed. She had faced down emergency surgery on the floor of the gate room and alien vampires without a blink. 

Yet she, like Andi and Candi she was a relentless flirt. It was a harmless flirting that she didn't expect to go anywhere and was hopelessly and uselessly in love with Dr Beckett. As far as Derek knew Dr Beckett was in love only with medicine and was too busy to even have sexual urges. Stiles had once surmised that Dr Beckett, being a clone, had lost that part of him and was asexual because the clone didn't have the medical parts of attraction. Derek didn't care, it wasn't his business so he let Stiles talk and neither contradicted or answered him.

In the months of his absence, Derek realised just how much of the silence that Stiles filled. Stiles talked so much that no one expected Derek to, and without Stiles, they found Derek abrasive and standoffish and rude. 

The Athosian children adored Derek because he could be the wolf for them and play, he let them chase him and jumped and played fetch and it was easy letting them laugh and run and the fond looks of the adults who took it as normal that he could turn into a giant black wolf as if it was something that everyone could do. They didn't ask anything of him, but shared their meals as a thank you for the day's childminding, or commented at how patient Derek was when their baby tugged hard at his fur or poked him in the eye or into his ear. 

When he had started visiting the mainland he had gone with Stiles who would sit with them as they worked. The Athosians were wary of most of the Atlantis technology and Stiles said it was quiet, that he couldn't hear the city singing when he was there and it felt like it allowed him to think. "She loves me," Stiles had said, "or Balor, it doesn't matter which, she loves us, and that love is unconditional and demanding. It makes me feel a little like Pygmalion." He had been husking the Athosian's bright purple corn, tugging away at the leaves and putting them to the side as he put the cobs into a bucket. "Sometimes it's like I don't know where she ends and I begin. I think I dream for her. I dream of quiet and the song of whales and being me," he had smiled at Derek, sitting there with a fat Athosian toddler asleep in his fur, "I immediately think of some sort of underwater leviathan trying to eat me and someone like Jason Statham or the Rock punching it."

\---

Derek was drowsing when Teyla came into the infirmary. Teyla was an alien princess and if anyone thought that would make her look like Princess Aura of Mongo or from an episode of Star Trek, mostly naked except for their naval strangely, because apart from her hair, which was the colour of newly turned Autumnal horse-chestnut leaves, a warm gold that he had never seen on a person naturally, she could have been anyone on the street. She was beautiful but she was neither green nor demurely seductive. She was a fierce warrior and leader but with a calm mindfulness that reminded Derek of a yoga teacher.

She wore the grey and red uniform of the command track and her hair was up in a ponytail with strands prettily framing her face. She wore her hair up thinking it made her less imposing and so Derek suspected that she was going to try to be maternal with him in the hope he knew more than he did. Teyla was honest, but she was still a leader.

She pulled up a chair and sat facing Derek, "I would ask you some questions."

"He hasn't woken up to say anything," Derek said. That sort of information would have passed among the higher-ups. Doug was still combing through the dirt and muck from Stiles' clothes and hair. They had washed him thoroughly with a sponge and even cleaned under his nails and shaved him. Stiles always looked like a vagabond in a _Wuxia_ movie when he grew out his facial hair. Asleep he looked young and vulnerable with chapped lips, glossy with vaseline, and deep shadows under his eyes.

"I don't know much," Derek said, unaware of how he turned his face between her and Stiles. He wanted to look at her with the manners drilled into him by his mother, that you should always give an alpha - which Teyla certainly was even without being a wolf - your full attention and his need to watch Stiles in case, between blinks, he vanished again. "He was barely awake. Doug will know more."

She nodded and made a noise of affirmation, proving that she had heard him and understood but that she still had questions. "Dr Beckett said over the radio," she started, "that there were items in his pockets," Derek nodded, there had been a broken wrist watch, the one Stiles had always worn, a golden ball covered in strange markings, some hard brown bread, and a piece of purple crystal that was probably amethyst. "And the child."

The child was currently being cooed over by someone in the city. She had been given a clean bill of health, she was even well fed, and with no trace of wraith enzyme in her system there was no need to keep her in the infirmary. When Teyla had her son the infirmary requested bottles and sanitisers and nappies most of which went into storage just in case, most of the Pegasus natives didnt bother with such things never having had them before. The baby was well provisioned and someone would be spoiling it in the meantime.

"She had a mark on her arm," Teyla said, "could you describe it for me, as someone who saw it in person."

"It was a line with five other lines coming off it at about forty five degrees, three on one side and two on the other," Teyla nodded, "it couldn't have been more than an inch long."

"Was it cut into her arm, or?" she left it open.

"It looked like a burn," Derek answered, "like the skin had been pressed against something hot."

Teyla's nodding was making him warier, he had not thought a baby could be considered a threat but Teyla's questions made him wonder if she was. Things were different in Pegasus and Derek understood that he was the outsider who had to learn. "Dr Beckett also said that Stiles gave her a name."

"Audra," Derek said. Truth be told he had not given the child more than a moment's thought, and that had been how he had not liked the stink of another person - even a baby - on Stiles at that moment.

"Awe-dra or Oh-dra?" Teyla seemed strangely fascinated by the pronunciation. She was a master interrogator making it look like she had stumbled upon the information instead of steadily guiding her subject to exactly where she wanted. Derek recognised the technique because the Sheriff, Stiles' father, was just as good at it. 

"Oh-dra," Derek said. He had not thought that the vowel sound was going to make a difference but it clearly did to her because she cursed, something he had not seen before. 

"I had hoped," she started but cut off. "It can't be." She was talking to herself.

"Will this hurt him in any way?" Derek asked, he had to be sure for Stiles because if he wasn't sure he would hijack the stargate and take him somewhere, anywhere, because he couldn't lose him again.

"I don't know." Teyla answered but her eyes were distant, "it is a myth, I had thought it nothing more; that it was not real."

"Like the _Tau'vol_?" He asked. Tau'vol was her people's name for werewolves.

"Yes, that they were extinct, that never would the word be spoken in the city of the Ancients for there are those here who would ask questions best left to children's stories." She stood up and adjusted her jacket over the vest she wore. "To us," she explained, "the Oudra are a children's story, a warning about the Ring of the Ancestors, a chide to children to behave or the Oudra will come for them and they will never go home. As a child, I believed they had a doorway under my bed that they might snatch me from. I believed them to be a child's story, one to keep children close that they might not be taken."

"Like they took Stiles?" Derek asked.

"Yes," her answer was succinct. "Exactly like that."

\---

Stiles woke as the second of the five moons crested the horizon. He had the curious habit that as he came awake he snuggled into the pillow as if, by driving his face further into it he might hide from sleep for a few moments longer. Derek heard the quickening of his heartbeat before even that telltale sign and as he woke he gave out a lusty sigh and burrowed a little under the weight of the blankets. He felt the cold most keenly and enjoyed the weight pressing him into the sheet, whether it was heaped blankets or Derek's arm. He looked across the pillow at Derek and offered him a sleepy smile with a pleased hum. 

Derek was so overwhelmed with what he wanted to say he found that there were no words left when he opened his mouth to speak and instead his wolf whined low and soft in his throat. 

Stiles reached out with a hand that he wasn't fully in control of yet and cupped it around Derek's head, pulling him in as he had in the gateroom. "I will always come back to you," he said in a voice thick with sleep. "I will never leave you." These promises had been marked over and over as Stiles held Derek like this, forehead to forehead so close that their breath intertwined and Stiles could taste the funk of Stiles' mouth after so long asleep, thick with dehydration. Stiles seemed to understand the pack bond between them much better than any other human Derek had ever met, losing Stiles had been like losing himself, his entire being ached with the loss like he had been snatched and only his shadow remained and for the first time in nearly a year he felt complete.

Derek whined again, words were too complicated for him and Stiles just gave him that dopey, sleepy smile that said so much without any words, and twined his fingers through Derek's hair as they remained forehead to forehead.

Dr Beckett gave them a few minutes before he came over, pretending to be more interested in his tablet to give them time to separate, but Stiles still kept Derek's hand within his own, his thumb tracing patterns on Derek's own. 

"Ah, you're awake," he said in a bright tone, "well, your vitals are looking good, a little dehydrated, a little malnourished but nothing a pot of tea and some tatties won't fix, I'll get Andi to get you some from the mess." Dr Beckett was a great follower of the doctrine of do as I say, not do as I do when it came to food. He liked his food simple and deep-fried or curries hot enough to melt the skin from bone. This was served with tea dark enough to chew in a cup big enough it needed both hands and often cold because he had forgotten his tea and guzzled it down in order to reuse the cup for the next brew. He drank his tea stronger than Stiles drank his coffee and Stiles had learned to make coffee at a police station where it was thick, burned and left all day to evaporate into a tarry sludge.

Stiles negotiated himself into a sitting position in the bed, not letting go of Derek's hand. "Anything else to report, doc?" He still looked pale and tired but he was as energetic as ever, "or can I drag this gorgeous lump back to our berth and make up for the last couple of days I've been missing."

Derek's mind whited out.

"Stiles," Dr Beckett said in that ominous tone he used to give people bad news, "you've been missing for two hundred and forty-four days," he was reading it from the tablet, but both Derek and Sheppard had a clock where they added another day for everyone who was missing. Sheppard kept it as standard for any missing crewmember and he disliked having to use it at all. He took every failure personally, even if they couldn't have been avoided.

McKay had once railed at him, in the gateroom in front of everyone, that Sheppard couldn't hold himself accountable because Kavanagh tripped over his own feet and dropped his pie. Stiles had just looked at Derek and smirked as if he was trying not to laugh.

"I," Stiles stopped, "no," he looked genuinely surprised, "I," his eyes went sad as he looked down and to the left, scanning what he remembered and what he knew before he said, "fuck."

"I think we can safely say that you don't remember what happened to you," Dr Beckett said.

"I," Stiles was genuinely confused, Derek was aware of the stink of it, "I, no I was gone less than a week, they didn't have me that long, I'd remember." He looked clear at Derek when he said: "I've always remembered before."

"Balor," Derek said firmly, "we don't know what he's capable of."

"He said," Stiles said, "We made a deal, he came back, he went back to sleep, he brought me back to you, he promised. He's always kept his word."

Derek wanted to be able to say something, to soothe Stiles so he would come down from this frantic fear that was overwhelming him and filling Derek's nostrils. Dr Beckett answered before Derek could, "aye, the ancients follow fae rules, I've found," he said, "they keep their bargains but never the way you think. They always get what they want."

"What did he want?" Derek said, "if he'd been active we would have heard, he's not subtle."

Stiles was counting his fingers, counting Derek's, counting Dr Beckett's. Derek recognised the gesture.

"Aye, I supposed we'll find out soon enough," Dr Beckett said with a tired smile, "nothing travels faster than bad gas," he then brightened, "except gossip in a small town, that's faster than the speed of light, someone drops something in a small town the entire neighbourhood knows before they've picked it back up." He said it entirely to make Stiles smile but he still looked confused.

Derek was confused too because he didn't know what situation Stiles had been in that he had bargained with the ancient that festered within him, bound and chained and for some reason, Stiles had let it loose. Stiles, who was absolutely terrified of the thing within him and what it had made him do, had been in a situation where he had bargained with it and that bargain had kept him away for eight months.

Derek hated Balor in that instant with the same hate he had once had for Kate Argent, and with the same lingering terror which left a sickness in his belly and a sour taste in his mouth.

Balor had tricked him, followed the letter of the bargain and not the spirit, and stolen eight months of Stiles' life from him. If he could Derek would tear Balor from Stiles, drive him out and drop him in the deepest crevasse of New Lantea where their suns never shone and no one ever spoke his name again.

The wolf inside him whined and cried, it feared Balor in a way that was tangible and almost overwhelming. The human hated him, the wolf feared him and both were Derek.

Something had caused Stiles to bargain with the devil and the hidden price was eight months for Derek and a short amount of time for Stiles. It meant that the person who had clutched Derek in the gateroom was Balor.

"Do you know anything about the bairn?"

"What barn?" Stiles asked.

"Bairn," Derek corrected, "you had a baby between your sweater and your shirt, in a leather harness."

"Fuck," Stiles said and it was the one thing anyone had said today that Derek could agree with. "I vanished for eight months and come back with a baby, it's not mine, is it? I'm too young to be a father."

"It's not yours," Beckett said, "well, unless you consider possession to be nine-tenths of the law," he was saying it to amuse Stiles but instead Stiles just went pale at the word possession. "It's fine, lad," Dr Beckett said in that mollifying tone he was so good at, "the bairn is with Brandi and she is being spoiled with warm milk and blankets and all the cuddles she can bear."

"Fuck," Stiles repeated, "Void fucking stole a baby."

"At least he didn't eat it," Derek muttered under his breath and the whole absurdity of it overwhelmed Stiles who started to laugh in a broken, almost manic state.

"Doc," everyone called Dr Carson doc, so he didn't think it strange when Derek did, "can we have a moment? let him eat."

"Oh, aye," the doctor said, "I want to see both of those trays clean, a stout meal will do the pair o' you a world of good."

\----

Colonel Sheppard had the decency to wait until the next morning before he came to the infirmary to ask Stiles for a briefing. He had in that time showered, where he made noises that were obscene, dressed in his green uniform - he still wore the quilted green jacket from Antarctica that he said made him look like Captain Emerald which had caused Bill Lee to cackle with laughter and say "this is the voice of the Mysterons" as he walked past- eaten and was just waiting on a potty break to be discharged from the infirmary.

Stiles liked Dr Lee. He got all of his pop culture references no matter how obscure. He had also ran a, to quote Stiles, bitchin' Call of Cthulhu campaign.

Colonel Sheppard was a small man who had enough charisma to make himself seem very large. He had a tendency to curl in on himself and combined with pointed ears gave the impression of being some kind of woodland sprite- possibly a redcap with how dangerous he was - although he did not seem it. He was affable and charming, laconic and witty and had patience enough to deal with McKay who was given to histrionics.

Dr Zelenka had said that McKay was both brilliant and capable, so it allowed him luxuries few other could have, like the temper tantrums, because so often when things went wrong he WAS the only one who could fix them, so he was usually sleep-deprived, surrounded by people who were not quite as capable - though often geniuses in their field, and overwhelmed with work. Derek was just glad that McKay had not inserted himself into the briefing.

Sheppard pulled a chair up to the bed where Stiles was sat crosslegged playing cards with Derek. "Colonel," Stiles said with a bob of the head, even though Sheppard insisted that they call him by name, they weren't marines and directly under his command after all. Their green uniforms marked them out as unusual but part of the crew. 

Like Ronon and Teyla, they were expedition members but it was vague and undefined. They were "specialists" on paper.

At the back of the room, Ronon slipped in and leaned against the wall. Derek liked Ronon, they had a lot in common, they were both taciturn and slow to trust and relied mostly on their strength but before the fall of his world, Ronon had been a poet and artist and loved to read. Derek shared that love of literature, even if books were rare on Atlantis because no one had thought to bring them. 

Ronon also liked to look menacing because he thought it was funny, but sometimes hoped it would break out in a fight because he loved a scrap as much as he loved literature. 

He was a huge man who had the manner of a bear whose arms someone had shaved and given a blaster rifle, he had long dreadlocks, usually caught in a pony at the back of his head, and exclusively wore leathers. His left arm was heavily tattooed with marks of his homeworld even though the Wraith had destroyed his civilisation. Stiles, who was generally attracted to smart people who could break him in half without thinking about it, thought he was beautiful.

"I don't know what happened," Stiles said and Derek couldn't hear a lie in his voice. "We camped out as normal, I went to use the privy we had dug and I heard something, I thought it was Capstan and I said his name and then there was a smell, sweet and like old ladies, old roses and dust, like how you imagine an old lady's house to smell." Sheppard nodded. "Then I woke up in the dark and I called out and I was told to hush. I," he stopped, "it wasn't that long, I had a PowerBar and I shared it, but there was water, there was a little fountain in the room, you could hear it trickling but I used the purification tablets on the bowl. I don't know how many people were in the cage, the numbers changed and the rose smell was everywhere."

"They drugged you," Sheppard said, it wasn't really a question.

"Yeah, it was in everything, the food, the water, the air, I was hazy, and there were other voices in the dark, I could hear them sobbing. I don't know where it was."

"Ehn'gha," said Ronon from the rear of the room. "The Oudra come from Ehn'gha."

"It sounds," Stiles started, "like you know more about this than I do, and maybe if we share." There was an anger in his voice which Derek couldn't understand, it was not a wave of threatening anger just a low banked rage that he could taste on the air.

"We call them the Oudra, but it translates as ghosts of the gate or ringwraiths."

"Like the Lord of the Rings?" Derek asked.

"Pretty much," Ronon said, "they take people through the stargate and they are not seen again, no one sees them come or go, people just vanish, usually kids, taken in full daylight between one blink at the next."

"So they have cloaking technology," Sheppard said. He was throwing out ideas in the hope Ronon could verify, "personal cloaking technology. Is that what's on your wrist?" He looked at the device on Stiles' wrist, something Stiles had barely noticed, a disk with a diameter of perhaps two inches covered in dials and symbols and a thin strap that held it in place.

"No," Stiles answered, studying it for the first time, "this is a personal DHD and shield."

"Fuck," Sheppard said, which was unusual for him, "those exist."

"Apparently," Stiles said surprised at the reaction, now he thought about it and with what he knew of the Ancients history personal shield and escape devices would have been standard.  
  
"What about the ball?" Ronon asked. At Stiles' baffled expression he put it on the table.

"Oh, that's a kino, that's what they called them on the Destiny, right, the camera thing, a kino. I found it, and I turned it on, it lights up, it doesn't have a screen anymore, but it lights up, and it was so dark in that place. I thought I was blind."

"I think we need to find this Enger."

Ronon said "Ehn'gha" at the same time Stiles said "no!"


	3. Chapter 3

Stiles was helping on the mainland, several days after his bizarre return, when Halling received word to send him back as they had found a way to access the footage on the Kino he had brought back with him and they wanted his input on what they found. 

It made Stiles uncomfortable and he worked the fence post he was holding into the ground with an angry twist. He hadn't spoken to Derek about what happened but he was having night terrors for the first time since their bond, and Derek was cognizant of his distress at the periphery of his awareness. He had walked in Stiles' mind and seen his terror, not of Balor, but at what Balor might do to those he loved.

Stiles was guarded and terrified all of the time that he might not be able to keep those he loved safe and so everything he did was to that end, he had even agreed to come to Atlantis for that sole purpose, to keep his dad safe because if Balor was in Pegasus he couldn't threaten him. It also amused him no end that he and General O'Neill had become the best of friends by virtue of sharing a love for sitting beside a river drinking beer and not catching fish. Stiles had only been eighteen when the stargate program knocked on his door and he was only just free from the wild Hunt which had stolen nearly a year of his life, so on paper, he was eighteen but it was not so clear in reality. They set him up with a cover story and took him to Colorado and inducted him in the program with the instruction that he was to attend the local university and help as much as he could. It had been nearly six months before he had rescued Derek because he needed a werewolf to restrain the darkness he felt growing in him. 

Once Stiles joined the SGC, telling Beacon Hills that he was joining an FBI internship before going to George Washington University in the fall to study criminology, a career none of them found unusual, he returned to Beacon Hills once and in that time he made his first deal with Balor. He gave the creature that was tormenting the town to the Ancient in exchange for quiet and it gave him time.

He had made a second bargain when he was taken. 

If the Kino had any footage of what Balor was capable of Stiles did not want them to have it. He had once told Derek he was scared that they would want to weaponise him, that he was expendable but Balor was valuable because they had no idea what he was capable of.

Daniel Jackson had, before demanding Stiles be removed from Cheyenne Mountain for finishing a translation that Jackson had been working on for nearly twenty years, found a reference to Balor having a mega weapon, something called the Eye of Balor which could cause rivers to boil and forests to burn and was so powerful it was kept lidded with something so heavy it took seven men to raise it, but Stiles didn't really have access to Balor's knowledge - he remembered things. It was, he had told Derek, like when you sing along with a song on the radio, you know all the words and all the pauses, but try and sing it on your own and you don't know it at all. His memories from the Ancient were like that, and Balor, when he had been known as Void, had kept all of the memories of all the people who had been sacrificed to him, so in a crisis, Stiles could remember what to do, like muscle memory, because Balor knew those things even when Stiles did not. The same was true of languages.

Derek had seen Balor in action, he had fought him and lost despite his werewolf strength. Balor was powerful and terrible and he was held in place by the bond Derek had forged by driving his claws into the back of his neck. Whatever magic had been woven into the werewolves by the Ancients that created them had been designed to bind Ascended Ancients to flesh, and without Derek there to hold him in place Stiles would vanish.

If the people here in Atlantis saw Balor they would look at Stiles differently and Stiles had left Beacon Hills as quickly as he had because his former friends looked at him differently, even after they walked through his memories. Derek owed Stiles his life many times over, just as Stiles owed him, and between them, there was comfort and friendship and desire and love. He looked at Stiles differently each day because each day Stiles gave him a new wonder to fall in love with.

In the puddlejumper Derek bumped his shoulder against Stiles and smiled. It didn't matter what they saw - Derek would have his back. 

Lorne met them at the hangar. Lorne was a capable blonde man who managed the marines in a way that they understood, Sheppard was a pilot and thought like one, so Lorne translated for him. Some people were sure that Lorne was the true leader of Atlantis and Derek wasn't sure that he wasn't. Sheppard made the big calls and saved the day, McKay made things work, Dr Beckett kept people working and Woolsey read a lot of paperwork so someone had to run the city, Lorne was a likely suspect.

Major Lorne was personable with a smile like sunshine and might have been almost as dangerous as Ronon. "They're in the blue lab," Lorne said, "I can walk you down."

"Are we under arrest?" Stiles asked.

Lorne scoffed, "no, why, should you be?"

"I," Stiles started and Derek put his hand on Stiles' shoulder to reassure him. 

"You were abducted and taken to a place that the Athosians won't even talk of, and that Ronon said was used as a reason to train the Satedan children to fight, some sort of Lovecraftian horror of a place, if something bad happened there it's not your fault."

"No," Stiles said, "it just looks like me."

\---

"I managed to get six stills from the kino," the A/V engineer said. Derek didn't know his name, he worked primarily with the audiovisual stuff that Derek had heard as skype in space, drank too much caffeine - even for Atlantis where Dr Beckett had said if he wanted a coffee all he had to do was tap a vein from a passing engineer- and twitched a bit.

Sheppard was leaning back in his chair, and McKay was glowering and muttering under his breath that this wouldn't have happened if he had been allowed to dismantle it. "Or you could have wiped it entirely," the A/V Engineer didnt work under McKay and it showed as he didn't flinch when McKay so much as breathed.

Sheppard smiled at the rebellion, in the safe way that someone who isn't involved would always find amusement at someone else's incipient misery. 

"The images were," he paused, "frankly a mess, without the tablet to take the extra footage it looped over itself and created a lot of ghost images, that I was able to pull six clean images is a testament to photoshop."

He pushed the clicker on his hand and his tablet switched to the screen installed in the conference room showing his rather unattractive screensaver. 

"How many stills were there in total?" Ronon asked, "before clean up." Ronon looked like Conan the Barbarian but he was from a civilisation that was technologically superior to Earth but it always made people do a double-take when he showed it.

"In total forty-five," he answered, "but most were obscured by thumbs, ghosts, double, even triple, exposures, unable to dump the information the camera function wrote over it, five, six, even seven times, sometimes erasing the data sometimes not. There was a garbled voice recording which I'm still trying to isolate but this is as good as it gets even with the software we have access to, I might be able to get more with more time."

For a moment Derek thought Stiles was going to suggest something, perhaps some piece of ancient tech that the engineer didn't know about. Then he thought better of it. If Derek hadn't been as attuned to Stiles as he was then he might not have even noticed it. If anyone else had it was only Ronon who was hunched over the desk like he was about to ask for his horn to be refilled with mead. Sheppard was sat back, arms crossed and McKay was fighting with the urge to pick up his tablet. Derek didn't know where Woolsey was. 

The SGC answered to the IOA but they didn't trust them.

"Six pictures from one device is remarkable, we did not expect so much," Teyla said with the flattery she used to prevent all-out war breaking out in the conference room, "the device is millennia old, you are to be commended."

McKay pulled a face but said nothing as the engineer clicked into the first picture. 

It was a vista, a cyclopean city seen from a balcony but the light was weird, the edge of the balcony was well lit but the buildings beyond were lines against the darkness, a shade or two lighter where the light of the kino spilled and there were nine great pillars that Derek could make out. "I massively raised the contrast here, it's at about 15000 percent so you can see anything, the filament in the kino was pretty burned out, it didn't give off a lot of light and it was only by a lot of post-processing we could get this much." Blown up on the wall was the city that Ronon had called Ehn'gha, the city of the creatures that haunted the gate network and stole children for them never to be seen again.

Derek wondered if this would be like them looking on to see Ry'leh, the city from Lovecraft where the monsters lived, some great vast metropolis in a place without light and even with the saturation turning the blackness to a washed-out grey it looked threatening and lost. Stiles had been there in the darkness, alone and Derek couldn't help but growl.

"Ehn'gha," Ronon said in a low voice full of horrified awe. "I never thought it was real."

"We don't know that it is Ehn'gha," Sheppard said, "it is just a city we have never heard of before in a cave." 

"It is Ehn'gha," Stiles said, "and that's only a fraction of it."

"I think we can safely assume that they're hostile," Sheppard drawled, "do we have any ideas of numbers?" he looked at Stiles.

"I'm sorry," Stiles said, "I don't remember."

Derek heard the uptick in his pulse, whatever Stiles remembered he didn't want to talk about it. Derek thought that Sheppard didn't believe him but he didn't push. He narrowed his lips a little and leaned back into his chair.

The second photo was of a cage but the bars of the cage seemed to be grown upwards from the floor like the roots of an upside-down tree. There were small reflective dots in the darkness although they were deep into the darkness away from the tiny pool of light given off by the kino. The light was warm, soft orange and in the photo, there was a pair of Atlantis issue military boots. It looked like the still had been taken as the kino fell. What information Atlantis got about the Destiny, and it was drips and drabs mostly carried by military scuttlebutt of horror stories of what was happening on the Destiny with a "aren't you glad we weren't posted there", the kino there floated and Stiles' might not have.

In his chair, Stiles was picking at the device on his wrist. It was inset in the skin but Stiles had nothing else that he could fiddle with, there were no ties at the collar to chew on, or a pen to gnaw to nothing. He kept putting his lip between his teeth but the surface was already raw and a little bloody where he had pulled the chapped skin free.

"Are they kids?" McKay asked, "can you blow that up?" then when the engineer didn't immediately expand the correct part of the image he snatched the tablet and blew it up and increased the saturation but it was already almost at maximum. "Fuck."

McKay wasn't given to profanity. He didn't need to be. He could flay a man at ten paces with his tongue without needing to curse so McKay cursing was, for the most part, like an unscheduled off-world activation alarm causing everyone to do a double-take. "They're only fucking babies."

It was hard to see them. Derek's eyes were not best suited to projection and blurred the details to him almost needing glasses for them, but all he could see was the reflection of what McKay thought were babies. "Look at them, half-fed and hopped up on wraith enzyme, looking like fucking Gollum."

Stiles bit down hard enough on his lip to draw blood. The stink of it bloomed around him and caused Derek to reach out and put his hand, claws extended despite himself, on Stiles' thigh. Stiles offered him a tight smile and reached down with his left hand, the one with the device on it, to take Derek's hand beneath the table and squeeze it tightly. It looked like he might have something to say, perhaps an explanation of what they could see, but he kept it to himself.

The third image was a pillar with ancient notation but even with the photo brought up to maximum clarity, there was no way of reading it.

The fourth made Derek flinch. Of all the stills it was the one that had needed the least alteration to make it visible.

It had the torso of a man but strange white roots emerged from and through it into a giant tree, it was bound and part of the tree. The neck was twisted at an unnatural angle and almost all of the limbs were gone, leaving a single arm and hand that was held in place by the glowing white vines. It was a wraith but unlike any that Derek had ever seen, and he had only seen one in the flesh, the rest from the footage, with the same fishbelly skin and slitted nose but its eyes had been uncleanly gouged out and metal beads shoved in the hole and healed around. The mouth was ripped open, the jaw missing and the tongue missing but the soft palate leading to the throat was present but there was nothing between the head and collarbone except a few scraps of meat around the vertebrae. The glowing vines were driven into its scalp holding it in place, but it had long red hair falling like blood around its shoulders that shone with health despite the atrocity of him.

"A Keeper," Sheppard said, "they've got a Keeper."

"The Fettered," Stiles mumbled under his breath.

Ronon pushed his chair back from the table, standing up as it did and letting it fall backwards. "I've seen," he started, "wraith worshippers, I," he couldn't find the words, "a city of," all of his usual bluster was gone. "All the stories and it was worse."

Ronon's discomfiture made everyone else more uncomfortable.

"What's a Keeper?" Stiles asked. "I don't know the term."

"McKay took the opportunity to be a teacher to lighten the room, to allow Ronon the time to come to term with what they had found, "there are castes of Wraith, like bees, there is a queen, commanders, drones and keepers. Most of what we clear out are drones and commanders. The commanders are the ones who talk and the drones are the ones with the faceplate."

"Saighdiuir agus Ceannasai," Stiles said, not realising he was speaking in ancient, "Banrion agus Leabharlannai."

Sheppard narrowed his eyes again, Derek wondered if it was the first time he had heard the language spoken. Sheppard was whip-smart, but he liked to pretend that he was not. 

"What's a keeper?" Derek asked again because he did not know at all.

"They manage the ships when the queen is hibernating," McKay said, "they are the ones who build and maintain their tech. Stiles, do you know if Ehn'gha has wraith tech?"

"I don't know!" Stiles said, "I don't remember, I thought it was a few days, I don't remember any of this." He sounded to Derek like he was on the verge of a panic attack.

Derek squeezed Stiles' hand. "Can we be excused for a moment?" Derek asked, "maybe get something to drink?"

Sheppard nodded, "take a walk, get some air, the city is on the verge of going into lockdown to protect him. We'll be discussing this with Teyla and Halling and decide what the next step is."

Stiles nearly bolted from the room, looking to Derek at least like he might vomit.

Sheppard nodded to Derek, letting him know that he should follow.

Derek caught up with him in the corridor, the lights were flickering but it was subtle, enough to make a human uncomfortable but not enough for them to notice what it was that made them feel so. Derek slipped his arm around Stiles' waist, "we've been dismissed," he said, taking a step and guiding Stiles with him, "are you coming?"

\---

Since Stiles' return, Derek had not visited his garden, and so it was the first time that Stiles had seen it since he had gone missing. He looked around with wonder, "how did you get the trees from the mainland?" he was turning around, face turned up to the dome to look at the trees that Derek had transplanted. They weren't large trees. with perhaps only thirty years growth, too much for a single person to lift but Derek had negotiated them, with their roots tied up with sacking, into a puddlejumper so that his garden could have shade for more delicate plants. Given time this room would look like a forest, even if the plants would never have been found side by side in nature. 

"Did you get the sprinklers working?" he asked, dragging his fingers along the planter, each of them had a different PH for different plants and the xenobotanists had spent long hours explaining to Derek how to change the PH and what composts to use and waxing lyrical about bees. "What about the dome, did you get it open?"

"It opens?" Derek asked, and Stiles' nausea seemed gone in the damp air of the dome, the sweetness of the blowsy hollyhocks that hung from their staves and the heady smell of the roses, flowers that were happy to thrive so soon after being transplanted, the verdant green smell of damp peat and the ozone smell of the ocean breeze carried through by the open windows. Amongst the flowers and straggly plants and bushes, that were yet to find their roots amongst the soil, Stiles laughed and it felt like a world had been lifted from Derek's shoulders seeing it.

It had been so long since he last saw Stiles laugh freely with joy and not mania. He laughed freely with his entire being and it lit his complexion so that everyone would turn to look at him and in that moment they all saw what Derek saw, that he was beautiful.

He was not beautiful because he had clear skin or remarkable eyes that seemed to shift from night-black to warm toffee depending on his mood, or how he had a mouth that was soft and red from biting, He was not beautiful because his limbs were straight or his shoulders broad, but because he felt everything so keenly with his entire being and it was that sense of expression that Balor broke in him.

Derek understood that only half of his fear was learning what Balor had done = the other half was the terrible knowledge that once Atlantis learned everyone here would look at him the way that they had in Beacon Hills - as a ticking timebomb just waiting to explode. They wouldn't see Stiles, they'd see Balor.

Derek sat on the planter to the left of him and indicated that Stiles sit next to him. "Do you want to tell me what you do remember?" Derek asked him.

"Not really," Stiles answered, "It was dark and it was cold and I needed you and I couldn't think, and it was too much, and I had to be strong because there were kids."

"Were they feeding the kids to the wraith?" Derek asked. More and more he was sure that they had gotten what they deserved, and whatever it was that Balor had done had not been enough to make amends.

"No," Stiles answered, "they were," he took a pause, licked his lips, "they were trying to make them immune," he sounded distant, looking past Derek to whatever horror it was that he remembered, "introducing the wraith enzyme then letting them recover, and if they died, they died, they could always take more. They were zealots, worshipping the tree that they bound that thing to, there was a woman, her name was Glory-unto-dawn and she was beautiful, the sort of beautiful that caused people to stop and stare. She had a voice like silvery bells and she would come into the darkness and coo over the children, telling them they were chosen, they were blessed that they would save everyone. There was something else there, in the dark, whispering, something like a hiss, just almost there where you could hear it and it what was in control."

"It was to save the kids," Derek said, "your bargain."

Stiles didn't answer, he just sat down next to Derek and burrowed into his warmth letting Derek wrap his arms around him. "I think I need to talk to Dr Bello," Stiles said quietly.

Derek wouldn't judge him for visiting her, the whole of the Atlantis expedition had, at some point, been in her office. "I've been seeing her since you were missing," he said resting his chin on the top of Stiles' head. "It helps." It hadn't but Stiles couldn't hear the lie.

\---

Dr Bello did not look like a military psychiatrist. With loose coarse grey hair, dark green cat eye glasses set with rhinestones, brightly coloured handknit sweaters and broomstick skirts she clacked around the city with brilliant large beads and a pair of handmade shoes from the Athosians. She looked better suited to wandering the woods somewhere and composing bad poetry or teaching high school art. Stiles had always joked about his sessions with her, saying that she was always one moment away from asking him to express himself with puppets.

Her office was at the top of one of the towers and had a whole wall that overlooked the ocean and on a clear day, it was possible to just see the mainland on the horizon. She had decorated it in brightly coloured rugs and fabrics that she traded for with the Athosians which meant it looked like it should belong in the Athosian village apart from the cables which hooked her plugs up to the mainframe and her oil diffuser, the room stunk of something herbal, and the beanbag chairs full of something native that was hard and pokey. For those who would not use the beanbags, which included most of the marines, there were a few normal chairs but she tried to dissuade their use.

Her office was always brightly lit and cheery which was the last thing Stiles felt as he walked up to the sign-up sheet. She opened the door as he approached, "Stiles!" she said in that bright inviting way of hers, "I was wondering when you'd come to see me," she looked over his shoulder at Derek and nodded, "are you both coming in? I've got no appointments booked right now. I was just going to put some coffee on to brew."

Dr Bello knew all of her patients by name and remembered their peccadilloes in regards to what they needed to feel safe with her. If Stiles needed Derek in the room she would not begrudge him, if Stiles felt unsafe talking about things with Derek she would ask him to leave. It was always about whoever needed to talk.

Stiles hovered in the doorway, unsure of himself. He recognised that he needed to talk to someone and Dr Bello was the best person for that job but that didn't mean he knew what to say.

"He's been having night terrors," Derek said, "calling out in his sleep."

Stiles hadn't known that. He'd known about the nightmares, but not that he had been vocal. It had been a long time since he had cried out in the night, not since he had been with Derek. He had not thought it was so obvious.

Dr Bello indicated the beanbag couch that they might sit, "let's talk about it," she said with a fond smile, "I'll get some coffee, and I might still have some breakfast pastries left."


	4. Chapter 4

_The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh…was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults._

_— H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)_

Stiles was tossing and turning in his sleep, and Derek found that he could not prevent it, he wrapped his arms around him, trying to rouse him as Stiles began to shout, "look away, look away, don't look at me," over and over again. He was slick with sweat and arching his back like he was being electrocuted and Derek couldn't wake him, no matter how he tried.

Stiles' heels were digging into the mattress, pulling the sheet away and clutching his blankets in fingers tight and white, "don't look at me!"

The lights flared to a terrible brightness all through the tower and with his enhanced hearing Derek could hear people complain about the lights coming on at this hour again. The city was trying to help Stiles but he was still asleep. 

"Stiles!" Derek said trying to wake him, shaking him, "Stiles!"

Stiles jerked trying to break free of his hands, "don't look at me."

"Stiles!" Derek repeated and with a gasp, Stiles stopped breathing. Derek could hear his heart, thumping away like a bass drum and even though he lolled like a rag doll Derek took comfort in that sound, steady and healthy and then the city went black.

Stiles came awake with a terrible gasp that seemed to be scraped from the back of his throat and clung to Derek like a baby monkey, desperate to never let go.

"We're going to see Carson," Derek said without a hint of question. Still gasping for breath Stiles didn't argue.

\---

Dr Beckett hooked Stiles up to the diagnostic machines again, and made hmming noises into his tablet and mentioned sleep apnea and asked if Stiles had ever suffered from it before. He walked over from the desk with his tablet tucked under his arm and two large steaming mugs, handing one to each of them. "Doc, I'm fine," Derek protested.

"It's for your nerves," Dr Beckett corrected him. Derek couldn't argue with that and took the mug of tea from him, breathing in the sweet steam. He was coming around to Dr Beckett's idea that there was little in this world that couldn't be solved with a cup of tea, mostly because it meant taking five minutes at least to drink it.

"It looks like you're fine, laddie," he said to Stiles, "there's nothing in your vitals to suggest a problem but I'd be happier keeping you in overnight hooked up to the machines," he bobbed his head, "just in case." Then the lights dimmed, "tired, are you?" He gave his tablet a fond smile as he poked at things on it. He used the touchscreen much like an Edwardian at a typewriter with hard stabbing fingers. "I suppose you were responsible for that wee power surge earlier, the one that brought up and turned off the lights."

"I didn't mean to," Stiles started, and Derek wondered for a moment if he might burst into tears. A good cry would do him the world of good but it had to happen naturally. Derek understood that about trauma.

"I doubt you could do it intentionally if you tried." Dr Beckett said at the same time Derek said. "He was asleep."

"I'll shoot a wee email to Rodney, let him know what happened, or he'll be wandering all over in his jockeys looking for a blown fuse, and let me tell you, it scares the marines. Never mind Donald where's your troosers it's Rodney get your troosers." He was lightening the mood to make Stiles laugh but he didn't get the joke. Instead, Stiles blew on his cup of tea. "I imagine you're talking to Dr Bello," Dr Beckett said. He was surrounded by military men most of whom wouldn't talk to Dr Bello unless they were told to by Colonel Sheppard so he would instead make suggestions that they see her. "You've been through a traumatic experience and the body knows long before the brain gets the memo."

"I saw her today," Stiles told him over the rim of his cup.

"Aye," Dr Beckett said accepting it, "well sometimes raking over the coals can have an effect or two before y'er done. You finish your tea and get a wee sleep, the pair of ye." Dr Beckett turned away, "if the two of you want to share that bed," he said, "I'll pull the curtain closed around ye."

The curtains had been added in the night infirmary by the expedition to give patients who couldn't leave some privacy whilst they slept, they were heavy loosely woven sheets of dark fabric bought from off-world like most of the heavy items in the city. Atlantis was in talks for setting up a neutral market area where all their ally worlds could trade both with the city and each other. It struck Derek as a sound idea.

With the curtains closed and the lights dimmed it was an intimate warm space around the ugly medical bed as Stiles scooted over so that Derek, wearing the sweats he had pulled on when he got up to drag Stiles to Dr Beckett, climbed in beside him, kicking off the unlaced boots he wore and pulling the heaped blankets over them, tucking Stiles' face into his neck and putting his chin on the whorl of Stiles' head.

"I'm sorry," Stiles muttered into the skin of Derek's neck.

"What for?" Derek asked him in the quiet dark.

"I," Stiles started and Derek could smell the wave of shame and fear and self-loathing that poured from him and kissed him on the top of the head.

"You didn't do it on purpose, although McKay will probably try to make you dim the lights on purpose from now on." Stiles chuckled despite himself. "Do you hold it against me when I have nightmares?" Against him Stiles made the smallest of gestures of dissent, "then wouldn't I be an ass for blaming you. I#m here, I'll be here as much as I can," he wanted to say I'll always be here but Stiles had just spent eight months apart from him because someone took him from Derek. Always was a promise and Derek couldn't keep it even though he wanted to. Derek knew Stiles inside and out, he knew all the good and all the bad and he loved him. It had been love for so long that Derek was surprised that there was a time before but he could pinpoint the exact instant he knew it was love - when Stiles had looked at a kanima and called it an abomination in the acknowledgement that there was nothing strange or disgusting about Derek being a wolf.

Stiles accepted all of him and at that moment Derek knew it and knew that he loved him.

It took Stiles a long time to accept how he felt in return. 

Derek had walked in Stiles' memories, he had seen all of him as Stiles saw himself and his heart had broken for a lonely boy who looked at monsters with wonder and not horror. He had looked at the stargate and saw possibilities. He had stepped into Atlantis full of hope and that was who Derek saw, not this broken young man terrified to go to sleep for fear of what the thing inside him might do.

"You're all treating me like I'm broken," Stiles said, "I don't know what he did."

"Stiles," Derek said in his most conciliatory tone, "you've lost nearly a year of your life, Balor took your body and you don't know what he did in that time, its okay to not know what to do or how to react, it's okay." Stiles' fingers dug into Derek's shoulders like spikes but he said nothing, "I'm here and I'll do my best to make sure that never changes."

"I hate this," Stiles mumbled. "I hate it so much."

Derek cupped the back of Stiles' head and kissed his forehead, "I don't hate you." He said it firmly so STiles would hear. "I hate what he did to you, but I don't hate you." Stiles needed to hear those words, but if Derek told the truth it might be more than Stiles could bear right then.

"What did I say?" Stiles said after some time, "in my sleep."

"Don't look at me," Derek answered.

"I don't want them to look at me the way Scott did, that I wasn't really there, I was just Balor and it was only a matter of time. He looked at me so differently and then in the SGC they changed it too, and I thought,"

"I don't think that's what you meant," Derek said, "these people haven't seen Balor, they've seen you, they don't know what he's capable of, they don't look at you differently to any other marine who went missing, they're expecting trauma but they don't know what he's capable of." Stiles needed to hear it but he wasn't ready to believe it. 

Derek wondered what Stiles had meant, no, what Balor had meant. Balor had been the one to tell someone to look away. Balor gloried in violence and rage and despair. He fed on it like a leech. Derek could not fathom why such a creature would ask anyone to look away and with such desperation. Whatever it was that Balor had done he had wanted to keep it a secret from someone and that worried Derek most of all.

\---

"Do you want to talk about that night?" Dr Bello asked, sat in her oversized wicker chair that was smothered in blankets, "the night it started."

Stiles wanted to curl in on himself more in the bright blue bean bag chair he had taken for himself. Derek had the suspicion Dr Bello favoured them because no one could be graceful trying to get out of a bean bag chair and once you had reached that level of ludicrous it was easier to talk about things that you might have considered embarrassing. The image of Sheppard trying to get out of one often made Derek chuckle to himself apropos of nothing.

"I've talked about it," Stiles said, "I've talked about it to every psychiatrist and counsellor and it doesn't change anything. I was an idiot, I thought finding a body would be cool, I didn't get very far, my dad caught me, I was left in the back of the squad car and Scott got bit."

"I don't think you're interested in that last part," Dr Bello said calmly, "I want to know why you went into the woods that night."

"I told you," Stiles groused, "I thought it would be cool."

Dr Bello clearly didn't believe him but she tilted her head, "what were you doing when you heard about the body?" 

"I was playing chess with my dad. He had a night off and he was teaching me, we were playing over dinner. He cooked pot roast and potatoes." 

Dr Bello nodded as if something clicked into place in her variant of the narrative. "And that's where you both were when he got the call, am I right?" Stiles nodded. "And your time with him was precious, because of his job, am I right?" Stiles nodded again, looking like he might burst into tears. "Could it be you went looking for the body so he'd have to spend time with you?" Stiles was speechless, "you told me you that you had decided not to be a doctor because you get squeamish around the sight of blood, which was why Balor gloried in showing you it. It does seem odd that you would want to find a body which would be gory, you knew how she had been murdered, just to impress a girl."

Stiles bottom lip quivered, "I wonder if you weren't resentful of her, not intentionally, because she took your dad away from you, then she took your best friend from you too because of what happened that night," she swept her hair back behind her ear, "and I wonder if you don't blame yourself for what happened with Balor because you went out that night in the hope your dad paid attention to you and it seems so petty in comparison to what happened after, but that was the impetus."

"I." Stiles voice wavered.

"Could it be you blame yourself for everything Balor did because you blame yourself for the chain of events that set him free?"

The colour ran from Stiles' face and if it was possible it would have puddled on the floor. Derek took Stiles' hand and ran his thumb over the knob of his wrist, "you are not to blame," Dr Bello said, "Balor was, is, whatever the tense is, an Ancient, a Titan, bound to a tree by the magic of another Ancient and he had been whispering for decades and he had gathered people around him to do his bidding, to cut down his tree, to find him a suitable host so he could take flesh and ascend again, and you stopped him, the pair of you bound him in place, except not in a tree this time, in you, Stiles, and Balor is responsible for Balor, and Scott is responsible for Scott, all you did was want to spend time with your dad."

A great sob burst out of Stiles and he almost flung himself against Derek's chest. Stiles might not have wanted to hear it but he needed to, and the revelation and Dr Bello's calm manner was enough to drive it home with the terrible finality of a hammer blow. Stiles needed to hear this, he needed to understand that the entire shit storm in Beacon Hills wasn't his fault just because he was selfish. He needed to hear how everything that had happened since that night wasn't his fault, but it didn't make it easy to hear.

Derek rested his hand on Stiles' back, murmuring reassurances. Dr Bello might not have looked it but she was an excellent psychiatrist and she had the precision of a razor for all her patchouli oil in the diffusers and the beanbag chairs. She had done a lot for Derek so he was patient with her, but had it been McKay who had made Stiles cry Derek would have ripped him in two.

Dr Bello got up and made tea whilst Stiles cried in Derek's arms. He needed the cry and both of them knew it, Dr Bello had known it. It was like releasing the valve on a pressure cooker before it exploded and when it was done Stiles would feel better, but for now, it meant breaking him down to rebuild him, and he could only do that where he felt safe.

\----

Derek opened his tablet when the email popped up on his desktop with a ding. He was in his garden, spreading compost with a wooden garden fork. The rain was sheeting down on the outside of the dome in a soft susurration noise and gave the greenhouse a moist swampy feeling. He wiped his hands on his vest before picking up the tablet, standard issue for all the expedition members, and opened the mail program in case it was important. He had been copied in on the images from the kino, all of them, and before even opening he scanned the address list to see if Stiles had too.

Stiles was terrified of what might be on the stills so Derek was glad that Stiles wasn't but the comments on the thread reinforced that belief. He was still reading them when another email popped up, this time from Sheppard who had bounced it back to Derek with the words "is this what you were worried about?"

That was enough for Derek to scroll through the gallery.

He had barely opened it when McKay sent him a message saying "see me"

and then Sheppard sent another one, "Lorne's office, 10 mins" with Stiles being copied in on that version.

Derek sighed. He had told them and told them and the SGC had told them but they hadn't believed it until they had seen it. He shook his head as he went over to the water butt to wash his hands and scrub water through his hair. He wouldn't have time to nip back to his rooms to shower and he was covered in muck and soil. Cadman who always made a complimentary comment about burly men covered in dirt would appreciate it at least. 

He was pulling on his jacket, a red quilted one to match Stiles' green one when he hit the main thoroughfare. "Looking good," Cadman said with finger guns and a wink. Derek liked Cadman, she treated him like a kid brother, not in the overbearing way that Laura had, but in the way that meant she teased him mercilessly and harmlessly. There was never malice in it and she had made Derek feel more welcome in Atlantis than almost anyone else. There was nothing maternal in her welcome, just a we're all in this together camaraderie and when she had learned he was a werewolf she had shown up with a jug of gusulan, a native liquor made from a fruit that looked like a dick, and told him all about the time that she had body swapped with Rodney and kissed Carson. She had, for a time, served on the George Hammond but she had been happier on Atlantis and asked that she be reassigned there permanently. Most of the marines never wanted to return after their tour.

Stiles had once come back from the labs and found her sat on their couch drinking a not beer and laughing. His only reaction had been, "save me one of those, I'm grabbing a shower."

The legality of giving Stiles a beer had been the entire topic of conversation that evening as they discussed age limits, international waters and which country would have sovereignty if any did. The general consensus, as more and more beer was drunk, was that the age limit for beer should be fourteen, eighteen for wine but twenty-one for spirits, and Canada was sovereign even though all three of them were American citizens.

Atlantis didn't feel like a military outpost, even if under all the scientists it was one, it felt like a university campus complete with beer, showings of the Rocky Horror Picture show at midnight and people arguing the theoretical physics of Star Wars in the corridors.

Derek hadn't even looked at the stills when he went into Lorne's office where Lorne, Sheppard and McKay were leaning over one of the tablet's, probably McKay's, discussing it intently.

Derek was prepared for the worst. He kept thinking of the scene in Event Horizon where the walls were covered in gore and there were teeth underfoot. Balor was absolutely capable of that kind of devastation, Derek had seen it firsthand in the Beacon Hills hospital, where without Ancient technology he had used shadow manifestations to slaughter everyone he could. He enjoyed devastation and despair; it enervated him, so Derek expected nothing less, if not much more.

The still they were looking over wasn't gore though, it was a wall of technology not entirely unlike the ones in Atlantis' core. Sat before it, like the eggs in Alien with just as much foreboding, was four orange devices that looked to be made of crystal or stained glass. Stiles' kino, which was to Derek's knowledge the only one in the city, had taken a picture of four fully charged zero point modules, no wonder they wanted to talk to him. 

There would be no talking them from looking for Ehn'gha now, not when it had something that they wanted. Atlantis needed ZPMs and they were apparently, like hen's teeth, and when they used the city it drained them. Derek did not know much about Ancient technology, nor the inclination to learn, but he wondered, and would not say out loud for his idea was to nuke Ehn'gha from orbit and forget it ever existed, if that device was charging them.

They were going to take Stiles back to Ehn'gha and make him face what Balor had done, and Balor knowing that they wanted those devices would almost certainly have taken them elsewhere. Stiles had already brought back technology, the kino and the personal DHD but it would never be enough. He could have rebuilt the city and it would never be enough.

Sheppard asked no less of his men than he would give himself. The problem was he would give all of himself and then some without question.

When Stiles came in, a few minutes behind, making apologies and explaining that he had been playing chess with the Spetsnaz, three members of the Russian special forces, they tended to keep to themselves on one of the piers where Stiles had said that they were working on a still. They were not the only ones working on a still, but they were the most surreptitious about it. They had the idea, although Derek had no idea where it had come from, that people might care that they had built it, even though most would just welcome the vodka, which at the moment was better used as antifreeze. Even with his werewolf healing, Derek felt like hell hours after drinking a glass, so it was probably toxic enough to kill a person.

The Spetsnaz were wiry men given more to explosive bursts of violence and loud braying laughter than the more military drilling of the Marines. There were three of them, Vasya, Alyosha and Pyotr, and because of the international politics of the IOA and the SGC and the Trust, they tended to be excluded and spent hours playing chess and drinking. When Stiles was with them he had a tendency to come back to the apartment drunk and laughing. Vasya was selling his vodka to the Athosians as a fuel source and so had access to their peach-like fortified wine. Vasya was dark-haired with a thin moustache and a scar on his lip, Alyosha was the tallest with brown hair but needed to shave more often than Derek and had enough hair on his arms like a bear, Derek thought he looked like Jeff Foxworthy, and Pyotr was small and boyish with a ready grin and cold hard eyes.

Stiles, who thanks to Balor spoke Russian fluently but like a fifteenth-century monk, thought they were hilarious. He was under no illusion that if the order came down they would put him down faster than the marines ever would. Cadman might have regretted the decision, the Russians would have toasted to him and carried on like nothing had ever happened. Stiles had once confessed that there was a comfort in that too.

The marines would hesitate if Balor swept through the city because they would see Stiles and not Balor and because of it they would die.

The Spetsnaz would not.

Stiles looked harmless. He had a quick grin and long limbs that he tripped over almost constantly, he was younger than most of the expedition by at least a decade if not young enough to be their child so most of them didn't acknowledge how dangerous he could be, even if they had been told and told and now they wanted to take him back to somewhere that Balor had exercised his will because they were greedy. 

If they were careful in their use they had more than enough power to last them several lifetimes. Derek wanted to shake them, to go no, you have enough, don't take him back there but the only thing staying his tongue was that they didn't know where Ehn'gha was.

McKay tilted the tablet to show Stiles the image, it was one of the few that weren't washed out grey from heavy saturation and raising the contrast as high as they possibly could, because the light from the display and the ZPMs were enough to illuminate it clearly. The look on McKay's face was that of a child who had caught their parent in a harmless lie and was proud of it but indignant that he had been lied to in the first place.

"And?" Stiles asked. "I can read what it says, if that's what you're asking." Stiles would always remain the wilful shit he had been when Derek had met him, he couldn't lie for shit but he could obfuscate like a master. Derek could see through him because he knew him so well.

"What is it?" Sheppard asked.

"It's a device and some glowy crystal things, its lit up and it's shiny," Stiles was describing it as if he was still that sixteen-year-old boy who wanted to believe in magic before he found out what it cost. "Is that one of the kino pictures?" he looked so wide-eyed and innocent that Derek wanted to laugh. He looked like he wanted to be helpful; He wasn't, but he looked at it. "Judging by the inscription it's not good, I mean you don't normally have this sort of thing with warning labels like that."

"Is it or is it not a ZPM charger?" 

Stiles made a face like he couldn't quite answer that, "it's not," he took a breath, "it's" he was trying to find an explanation for a concept he understood but that didn't mean he had a way to express it. Stiles remembered everything Balor did, he remembered everything that every body sacrificed to Balor, every soldier who died on the field where he was planted and dragged themselves to the shadow of his tree to die out of the sun, every hunter that found themselves lost in the wood and wanted a quiet place to die, every one of them he remembered what they remembered but he didn't know what they knew. He didn't have the muscle memory and without a trigger those memories meant nothing, they were like the recitation of a movie someone had seen once ten years before. Very few of the memories had context and it was only because Balor had ascended before he was bound to the tree that Stiles had those memories at all, he had the capacity to remember those things, and as good as Stiles' own memory was he was only human and humanity only had so much space to remember things.

"The wraith, how did the wraith happen?" Stiles asked he needed to find a way to explain this to someone who was more interested in finding the technology.

"The ancients made them to combat the Replicators," Sheppard answered, it was an easy enough answer.

"And how did the replicators happen?" Stiles continued.

"The Ancients made them."

"Okay, why?" McKay clearly hadn't expected this for he harrumphed and went to talk over the explanation. "Why would a species as advanced as the Ancients were create something as dangerous as the replicators."

"Hubris," McKay snorted.

"No," Stiles answered, "you don't make a bomb because you don't realise it's going to blow up, they made them to be dangerous because they needed them to be dangerous." Derek knew him well enough to know he was scared, "they built a weapon because they needed a weapon and,"

"there was something they considered dangerous enough," Sheppard said, "that it was worth the risk."

"So why?" Stiles asked, "what is dangerous enough that they'd make the wraith and the replicators to stop it."

"The Ancients," McKay said, "they had technological superiority by some measure." There was an arrogance in his voice as he said it but it wasn't personal, the tech was amazing, it seemed like magic to Derek, so that McKay would treat it like it was godly was not a surprise or out of character.

Stiles' expression said he almost had it but had missed it at the last minute, like tripping at the last step of a home run.

"So who was the only thing that might have given them pause, that made a notoriously xenophobic species who looked down on everything form alliances with the Nox and the Furling, who was the only thing that could have killed them."

Sheppard's eyes narrowed and he looked even more puckish at that moment than he usually did. "The ancients themselves," he said finally. "They went to war against themselves."

"It's in our mythology," Derek said quietly, he had talked about this with Stiles for hours in the darkness on the Daedalus, he had thought it common knowledge but these two were reacting like it was a stunning revelation. "The Fomoire were driven out by the Tuatha de Danann. The Tuatha created terrible beasts and wondrous animals, they would take people just because and had amazing powers but they fought endlessly against the Fomoire."

"Fairies?" McKay scoffed, "you're expecting me to accept fairies?"

"No!" Stiles snapped, "I'm trying to tell you the ancients were really fucking dangerous and that that!" he stabbed a finger at the screen, "is why there is no light in that place because the power in a ZPM has to come from somewhere and the power in those, that came from the world itself, it pulled the power from the sun and the stars and it broke that world so that the creatures that haunt it, the ones that steal children are all taken, fed to a wraith to get immunity so that they can survive that place but can't leave it because they're poisoned. I don't know where that city is, I don't know the co-ordinates but I can tell you it was a Fomoire base and it was primed to destroy something before it destroyed itself." He wiped the spittle from his chin, surprised at his own anger. "And if I did know if there were a way I could find out- which there's not- I wouldn't tell you. There were several stations like that, mega weapons, traps and horrors and ten thousand years hasn't lessened them at all, it's just spread like filth. That was Fomoire tech. this," he thrust his wrist in their faces, "this is Fomoire tech, and it's part of me now, I can't get it off without chopping off my fucking arm and even then the naquadah will kill me. Do you get it? Do you want your people to look like Glory-unto-dawn did, or what about that wraith? Pinned to a device so he powers it when they feed him. The Fomoire were bad enough that the Ancients, who notoriously didn't give a fuck, did their damnedest to wipe them out and built military outposts everywhere because they were Ancients too."

"And Balor?" Sheppard asked. He had remained calm and quiet through Stiles' outburst.

"A Fomoire champion," Derek said, "slaughtered and bound by his own kin, and his super weapon lost."


	5. Chapter 5

Sheppard sat down as Stiles finished, panting with the exertion of it. Stiles was red-faced, his mouth open and bitten raw and he was almost in a lurch as if he was about to spring forward and hit McKay with something. 

McKay was just as angry, fists clenched and ready to explode but Sheppard, calmly cut him off. "We need those ZPM," he said.

"No," Stiles said, "you don't need them, you want them." Derek wondered how they couldn't see that Stiles wasn't angry, he was terrified. Derek wanted to take Stiles back to his garden, to settle him on one of the bench planters and give him _heiscuil_ tea and wrap him in blankets and tell him he was loved and he was cherished and he would never have to go back there but Stiles would resist it, even if he needed it right then.

Derek wanted to whine, to lure him away from what he considered a danger. Stiles was terrified and yet he stood his ground. 

As McKay went to splutter Sheppard spoke again, "is there a way that we could get them safely?"

"I don't know," Stiles answered, "and I don't know what happened, I genuinely remember very little, between the purple dust that smelled like old ladies and the Wraith enzyme," he rubbed at his chest where the handprint was, "before I lost control, it's a muddle. I have this fear, and I don't know how much of it is even mine and how much of it came from the wraith and how much of it is Balor's, but it's _so_ much, it's like I'm a water balloon filling up and filling up and filling up with it, and it's only a matter of time before I burst, and I'm terrified what is going to happen then. Balor is so dangerous and I'm scared if I go back there, if something is brought from there he's going to seize control despite his bounds and..."

Rodney's harrumph -which was clearly about to lead into a tirade- was cut off by Derek's growl and he did a double-take.

"Rodney," Sheppard said in the crisp military fashion he only used when he expected people to obey without question, "remember Arcturus." Rodney paled. "This might be like Arcturus." Derek didn't know what Arcturus was but whatever it was it silenced Rodney in moments. He turned to Stiles, "Dr Bello has you off duty but you're not a marine, you don't have to listen when I give you an order, and you're not part of the science team even if someone" the look he gave Dr McKay was one of fond exasperation, "thinks of you like some sort of mass spectrometer," McKay looked to be about to argue when he thought better of it. Sheppard might have looked smugly amused but it was clear enough to make McKay pause, perhaps to have his histrionics in private. He didn't like to be questioned and with commanders other than Sheppard he would harangue them until he got his way. McKay was mostly correct about the things he got himself involved in- although removing citrus from the anti-scurvy lemon bar dessert was one most people disagreed with - he backed down when Sheppard told him to. Stiles had made the joke in private that Sheppard would withhold sex and although everyone knew the two were as good as married in an open secret that had predated the legalisation of gay marriage or even the repeal of don't ask don't tell.

Derek wished them happiness and long lives but he didn't want to think about them having sex.

They were like the parents of the Atlantis expedition.

To try and get Stiles to understand his reticence Derek had once made a joke about his dad and General O'Neill and their fishing trips and Stiles had turned the colour the British members of the expedition called "sausage roll meat grey." It raised a question about the colour and why anyone would eat meat that colour that Derek didn't want the answer to either, yet when they got their deliveries from the Daedalus they gushed over how they'd have sausage rolls. Derek was the same for the frozen corn dogs so he couldn't really judge, but it was a distinctive and offputting colour. The term stuck though.

"I'm keeping you on Atlantis for now," Sheppard told them, "but you can go to the mainland, Lorne," the blonde man had kept quiet, he didn't get involved in a lot of the politics of the expedition which suited him, but it allowed him a measure of anonymity which meant it was easy to forget that he was in a room unless he was actively participating, "I want you to take Stiles through a full debrief, and to get as detailed a statement as possible because if there is someone out there snatching people I want as much information about them as possible. I also want off-world teams to ask about the Oudra, but not to press it, if they clam up let them don't antagonise people, but if they ask be honest, we had someone taken. They've gotten on our radar and we need to know if they need to be eliminated, imply that they will be. 

"Rodney, I want you to work with the language experts and see if you can get a translation of the table. Stiles is clearly traumatised and we are not going to press him. After the debrief we treat him like it never happened, am I clear?" Rodney agreed but he wasn't happy about it, "if he says he needs a time out he gets one unless the city is on fire, am I clear?" 

Even in full command, Sheppard didn't feel like he was giving orders, he turned to Derek, "the same goes for you, Derek, you're on light duty, keep him safe, manage your garden." He had a slow syrupy smile, "is it possible for you to grow barley on the mainland." Derek understood what Sheppard was doing, "to go with your coffee trees." He was offering Derek an out, a way to change the conversation and distract McKay, "maybe Stiles can help you with the labour."

"Stiles is a string bean," Lorne said with a smile that suggested he was fond more than mocking, "he won't be able to handle the tools."

Stiles continued talking to him as they left the office with a mocking "haha, is that what you say to Parrish? that he can't handle your tool?" Lorne laughed as they walked along, Stiles might have been faking it but he at least seemed more at ease and less like he was going to shatter into pieces at any given moment.

\----

Lorne arranged to have the debriefing in Derek's garden, sat on one of the planters with a tape recorder between them, Lorne had a tablet and was making notes on it, but he couldn't keep up, he was a soldier, not a dictation typist. Derek was on the other end of the enclosed garden turning the soil and adding fertiliser, and animal muck with a sweet earthy smell. The expedition was unsure of Derek's abilities and often forgot that he had supernatural hearing so it was possible Lorne thought that Derek couldn't hear them, but he could even hear their heartbeats.

"I'm ready when you are," Lorne said and took a drink of his _heiscuil_ tea, he kept it in a travel mug to keep it warm but Derek could smell it, Stiles was drinking one of his two cups of coffee of the day. Coffee was a rationed luxury in the city, and everyone was watching Derek's coffee trees with a hungry impatience.

"Okay," Stiles said, rocking back and forth as he considered what it was he was going to say. "As I said in my previous debrief," he sucked his top lip into his mouth and scraped his bottom teeth over it in thought, "I stepped out of the camp to use the latrine, and I smelled something, powdery and like roses. The next thing I knew I was in the cage. I don't remember going through the stargate but my memory is full of holes. I remember what happened on a random afternoon in April 1522 but this is, it's swiss cheesed."

"What was in the cage?" Lorne was patient and took notes as he went, his fingers clicking on the keys attached to his tablet, typing on a screen was horrendous.

"It was open, there was no roof but the bars, if you can call them that, seemed to reach to the sky, much much higher than I could reach, maybe twenty-five, thirty feet, and they glowed, but they didn't give off light, it was like one of those glow in the dark stickers, yanno, they had a sort of ozone smell, like seaweed, you know that smell, but the entire place stunk of rot. There was water, like a water cooler and it was topped up regularly but I don't remember eating. The floor was spongy and cold to the touch, but it didn't have a chill, I don't remember being cold."

"The last time I was held in an alien prison, it was freezing," Lorne offered, "so you're lucky there."

Stiles snorted a laugh, "I'm told it's a rite of passage, being kidnapped by aliens and held in prison for at least twenty four hours."

"It's the Atlantis experience, go off-world in an alien galaxy, see all the prisons of the gate network." Lorne was being facetious to lower Stiles' worries about what he was talking about.

"I was there for a while before the smell came back, that powdery old lady rose smell," Derek started to pat the ground that he had disturbed back to flatness and went to get the hose, he had to focus on his plants or he would wolf out and drag Stiles away.

"the next thing I remember was being in the room with the wraith, Glory-unto-Dawn was there." Stiles suddenly stank of discomfort, like he had sprayed the garden with his chemosignals.

"The leader of Ehn'gha?" Lorne asked, he couldn't smell what Derek could and didn't notice Derek crushing the leaves of one of his peppermint plants to mask the smell, which was sharp enough to burn his nose.

"I don't know," Stiles said, "she was not the only one I saw, but she was the only one I knew the name of. She was," he stopped thinking of the word, "she was bone white, in the kino's light it was a purplish-grey, like a drop of ink in white paint, and her eyes were black, solid black, all pupil to compensate for the dark, but her mouth was red. She looked like a vampire in an old fairy tale, with this long white hair she wore in braids, it was like if you crossed a Wraith and a person, but she had no wraith characteristics, she was just, it was like she was carved from bone, and she wore a white cloth gown that was almost sheer but covered in beads that shimmered when she walked, barefoot. She had sharp teeth, like little fangs, and she spoke with a lisp, just now and again, like her words would get caught. Her skin was cold, and she was so proud of what she was, she thought she was beautiful, but she was like a white willow branch, thin but not emaciated but elongated and she cupped my face and she could see Balor in me, she spoke to him, not to me, about how she would make his host better and he could lead them. That's when she gave me to the wraith."

Stiles was quiet for a long moment as Lorne tap tap tapped on his keyboard.

"I heard, I mean everyone hears, don't they, what it's like from people who survived it, how it's like a high with the most excruciating pain until you white out, that's what I expected, I think that's what she expected. Hell, it's probably what the wraith expected." Derek lifted his trowel and stabbed it into the earth, he was angry and he wanted to hurt something but there was no one to hurt. So instead of stabbing someone, he stabbed the earth. 

"It wasn't like that," Stiles said, quietly, "it was, at first I didn't feel anything, no pain, no high, just pressure," he put his hand on his chest and the scars there and rubbed gently, "then I felt the world explode." There was a quiet, reminiscing chuckle before he continued, "I remember that so well, I remembered what he remembered, I experienced what he had. It had spent thousands of years there, bound to that stone with the roots running through him like liquid fire as they used him as a power converter for the thing that grew through the world like a parasite, the aftereffect of what the Formoire had done. It was like a great tree growing down into the core of the planet, taking what heat remained there, the tree was curled around the ember that remained like a dying dog in the cold. The planet was only just alive, they had drained it dry and what power it had was fed through the wraith and it was in so much pain it had almost no consciousness, just pain, and the pain was greatest when it fed. It wanted to die. 

"It had survived the felling of its ship; the destruction of its hive; the death of its queen. It was alone when it was never meant to be and it was," he stopped, "I feel Atlantis, it's like a happy earworm, a song you can't get out of your head but with this sense of, not love, for she cannot understand that; the Ancients didn't, but warmth and comfort and reassurance that she will do what she can for me, it's like being wrapped in a blanket when I'm in the city," Lorne was still tap tap tapping away on his keyboard and Stiles sounded like he was talking to himself more than being debriefed, saying what he needed to say but not what they necessarily needed to hear.

"It was like that but in reverse, like you were wrapped in cold and sharpness and there a squealing in your ears that you could almost hear, just enough to make your teeth hurt and all he had left was sensation and pain."

"I could feel Balor twisting in my gut, I had been away from Derek long enough he would have risen on his own, not enough to take over but enough to whisper, to manipulate, and," there was a pause even though Stiles' tone was dreamy and distant, "but it was different, he's never done that before, it was like he was a giant writhing snake in my belly and it almost hurt, like a chest-burster I suppose."

Another pause was punctuated by the tap tap tapping of Lorne on the keyboard making notes.

"I should stop watching horror sci-fi movies, I mean I live in one." He laughed then but it was forced. On the outside of the dome, it started to rain, the sky almost royal violet with the weight of it, falling on the structure in heavy splats that sounded like slaps.

"Glory-unto-Dawn pulled me away, and I think I blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was in a room, it wasn't quite a cell but not quite a dormitory, there were still roots blocking the way but there were straw pallets and more water, a spigot and tap that led away into the darkness. It was such a weird place, it wasn't cold as much as empty, the very air felt empty like there was an absence there. I had a migraine, or at least it felt like one, and there were kids, they ranged from unable to care for themselves to just before puberty. She was changing them, making them like her, and if it failed, if the pain was too much or the enzyme too strong and they died, it didn't matter. There were always more children.

"She served the not-a-tree, the thing that grew in the darkness around the core, it was her god and that wraith was just the instrument of sacrifice, of no more value to her than the cup that holds her tea."

"Were there other people there?" Lorne asked.

"Not that I saw but there must have been. I was special, she told me, that she was seeing to my transformation personally. They didn't want me, they wanted Balor, they thought he might lift them from their world, restore it to what it was before the Breaking, before the Dark. The Oudra had been valued and respected, they were the beloved servants of Indech, the leader of the Fomoire, he had started the process of rebuilding but he had not finished it and they thought Balor was Indech, they thought I would rebuild what he had torn down, but he was still there, in the glowing roots and the veins of the shattered wraith, like a poison in the air."

"And what happened next?"

"I made a deal," Stiles said, "because there were babies, literal wriggling babies unable to lift their own heads, taken from peoples that had never heard of Atlantis or the worlds beyond their gates just that their kids sometimes vanished from their cradles."

"With her?" Lorne asked.

"No," Stiles said bluntly, "with Balor."

The trowel snapped in Derek's hand.

Derek had known that Stiles had done it. Stiles had told him, but to hear him say it so calmly when the idea of it made Stiles sick to his stomach was enough for Derek to close his hand around the handle of his trowel tight enough that the metal snapped under the strain. With a curse under his breath, he pulled the sharp edge out of his palm and let the blood drip for a moment as it healed, before wiping the healed hand on his pants.

"I would give him control," Stiles said continuing like Derek had not just reacted so violently- like the rain was not coming down outside in sheets that were heavy enough to sound like hissing- like the skies were stained almost indigo with portent. "I gave him control, I would let him do what he wanted without restraint, i wouldn't struggle or question, I would remain quiescent which I never have before on two conditions," he paused and Derek closed his eyes and pressed his lips, he didnt' want to hear this. "That he save the children, finding them a place where they could be safe away from the ghoul that ruled that place, and that when he was done, that when whatever it was that he wanted to do to this place and the children were safe, that he come back here, to Derek. Balor agreed, and after that, I don't remember anything, not until I came to in the infirmary."

Lorne nodded sagely, eyes fixed on the screen as he tap tap tapped away, the tip of his tongue poking out from between his lips as he concentrated.

"I know Sheppard wants to know about numbers but I don't know, I only saw Glory-unto-Dawn and the children. I don't know where I found the Kino, I don't know where I found the crystal or why it was important and I don't know why I was carrying a baby."

"Teyla said the child was wraith-touched and she was having difficulty finding it a new home," Lorne said even as he tried to continue typing but he was a man of action, not a man of doing two things with words at the same time because he stopped typing, "it's a bad omen apparently."

"Do they think she's going to bring down the wraith on them?" Stiles asked, "because she's a baby." Since he returned Stiles had gone to see the child, fussed over by the entire expedition in the expectation that she would soon be gone and with her any obligation. She was a pleasant distraction in a city where there was very little to do in the downtime. "Even if she could contact the wraith the only message she can give them is buh, a sticky fist thrust in their direction and spit-up."

"I think they're scared the Oudra will come after her, that when they do they'll take their babies too." Lorne said it calmly, "for most of the civilised worlds of Pegasus the Oudra were just a child's fairytale apparently, no one thought that they were real, and then someone finds a baby that was taken by the Oudra and went here, I do think they're being reticent for a reason, I understand why even if I do think it's stupid."

"At least no one suggested sacrificing her," Stiles forced the joke knowing it was in bad taste but Lorne made a noise and Derek felt Stiles' reaction as if it was his own, a wave of disgust like bile in the back of his throat.

"If it comes to it she can go back on the Daedalus, she's young enough she wouldn't remember it, she can either be adopted privately out of the SGC or even go into the system." Lorne didn't seem keen on the idea but it was a sound last cast scenario.

"How would you explain her scars, I mean if she's in the system?" Stiles asked, it was a good question and one Derek had not considered asking.

"Abusive parent, taken by the state and any sickness from the wraith enzyme we can explain as addiction in utero, the SGC has rehomed kids before, the IOA aren't pleased but I think that's more to do with internal politics, one of them is desperately trying for a baby, she might take her. The ideal is finding her a home here in Pegasus but we won't let harm come to her." Lorne sounded so methodical as he talked, quiet but never patronising. He was the sort of man who easily gained loyalty from his subordinates. He was calm and steady, like a rock, but with the knowledge that he would stand between you and trouble. Sheppard was a hail Mary pass, he'd come in at the last and save the day but he didn't seem as reliable and steady as Lorne. Lorne may have been predictable, and dependable but that kind of reliability made him irreplaceable.

Sheppard and McKay saved the city but Lorne commanded it. Sheppard was the charismatic star around which the city orbited but Lorne made sure the city did the circuit.

"About Forward-unto-Dawn?" Lorne said, and there was a burst of amusement from Stiles, a sweet sticky smell undercut with something like cloves. Derek didn't know why that amused him.

"That's what I thought as soon as I heard her name, I think it was one of those ring things," he said, his hands waving back and forth, more himself at that moment than he'd been since he came back, "you know her name was like some string of phonemes but because of the ring it got turned into what it means, you know how Evan comes from John which means God is gracious, I don't even wanna know what it would do with my name but yeah, it was probably something like Leokadia but we heard Glory-unto-Dawn."

Derek didn't know which of them was trying to avoid asking about it, so he kept his head down and worked on turning the soil for fertiliser. If he worked on the garden; if he kept his head down they wouldn't see how his fangs filled his mouth, how his claws were fully extended and how the hair on the back of his neck stood proud with a string of emotions he couldn't quite process into things which could stand alone. Every part of him wanted to wrap Stiles up in his fur and take him somewhere where there were no wraith, no marines, no Atlantis, no Balor, where it was quiet and safe and Stiles would never suffer again.

"What was she like, was she like a threat?" Lorne asked, "do we need to prepare for the threat that she will return and that she..."

"There's a polish myth," Stiles said, "my babcia used to tell me to scare me, I lived in California, but there is a river going through Beacon Hills and she was terrified I'd drown, she told me about the Rusalka, this beautiful woman who lived in the water, how she looked like she was made of stone but she would lure people into the water and kill them, she'd drink their blood and then eat their bloated flesh. I believed her of course, as a toddler I wouldn't have a bath because I was so scared of the rusalka. I outgrew it but I grew up with this terror of drowning, I learned to swim to overcome my fear and I learned everything I could about it and the only reassurance I had was that rusalka weren't real, there was no such thing as a rusalka." Stiles paused for a moment, "then werewolves happened and that fear was like a kernel in my belly. When I saw her, when she stood there, illuminated by that not-light, sleek and lovely like a fish, that is the thing I thought of immediately, that she was a rusalka.

"Proud as a queen, and," he stopped again, "as beautiful and terrible as the dawn, what's the line, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair! That's what she was like." Derek clawed furrows into the soil in front of the apothecary rose. "Beguiling and beautiful, benevolent only because she chose to be, but old, and altered. She had been human once, but centuries of using wraith enzyme, or filtering her own life through that thing, she hadn't been human in a long time. I saw it in the wraith memories, them bringing her to the thing, back when it had eyes to see with, but I don't know how long it was. Centuries definitely. She wanted Balor," he stopped rubbing his chest again, "she wanted to create a host for him worthy of a god, she worshipped what remained of the wraith but she was a high priest to the Formoire. I don't know if there were others. I don't care to know either, fuck Ehn'gha, fuck the formoire, there is so much in this universe we don't understand and all of it seems to want to fuck me over." He stood up and looked over at Derek, "Is that everything, Lorne?" he asked, "I'd really like some fresh air."

Derek stood up and dusted the soil from his pants, he didn't mention the sheeting rain that fell on the city giving it a swampy, foetid feeling. If Stiles wanted to walk outside the city at that moment Derek would have built a pontoon for him to walk on.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we all knew I wouldn't hit 50k in a month, between health issues and a 6 month old puppy I'm surprised I hit 20k  
> but things are starting to appear, who wants to know what Balor did on his holiday?

_“It was a wonderful thing to think for how many thousands of years the dead orb above and the dead city below had gazed thus upon each other, and in the utter solitude of space poured forth each to each the tale of their lost life and long-departed glory. The white light fell, and minute by minute the quiet shadows crept across the grass-grown courts like the spirits of old priests haunting the habitations of their worship--the white light fell, and the long shadows grew till the beauty and grandeur of each scene and the untamed majesty of its present Death seemed to sink into our very souls and speak more loudly than the shouts of armies concerning the pomp and splendour that the grave had swallowed, and even memory had forgotten.”_   
**\- H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure**

"I'm bored," Stiles said like they weren't the two words Derek feared the most from him. Stiles could spend days engrossed in a simple task but if the mood struck and he was bored, then nothing could be done. He could not be entertained. He simply was bored and determined that everyone around him knew it, with the corollary that nothing would change it.

He could not sit and read a book because the boredom would make it impossible to concentrate on the words. He could not attempt a task for the same reason. Anything he tried would be tainted by the boredom and there was little to do but wait it out like a sickness.

He was sitting on the pier with his feet dangling in the water, appreciating one of the few clear days of the summer where the heat was oppressive and the threat of storms on the horizon painting the sky the colour of amethyst. Derek sat beside him, enjoying the cool water on his bare feet. The past few days had been arduous. A vicious storm had rolled over the water towards the mainland and it was almost all hands on deck where the marines were put to work supporting outside structures built by the science staff, sweeping thick swathes of water from the decks and putting sandbags down at the doors of unexplored parts of the city that were prone to flooding and allowed water to sluice into the city. One engineer, a bonny young woman called Liz who had built a personal stove for the engineering lab, was seen chasing sheets of paper floating away down a corridor shouting "my diagrams" as they went.

Both Derek and Stiles had been put to work, whether that was carrying sandbags, or taking perishables up from the lower shelves of the store to where they were out of the range of the water. The storm had lasted four days and had kept the city busy, with Stiles in the command centre as the city told him where the water was rising. He stayed on the radio as Derek was used for heavy lifting and at one point rescuing a biologist who was knocked into the water. 

It was a year for storms.

The furore of the storm had meant that the interrogation to discover what had happened in the missing months was forgotten but the shadow of it hung over Derek like the storm on the horizon. He knew it would come back to hurt them but there was nothing to be done, and the quiet of being able to sit on the pier and just dangle their feet in the water was a welcome respite.

Stiles lay back against the pier and spread his arms, looking up at the sky. Derek had taken that position some time ago with his head on his wrists and his arms splayed behind his head. "I hate being bored." He said at last.

"I hate you being bored," Derek answered and Stiles huffed out a laugh. IT was good to hear him laugh after the last year.

"Derek," Stiles said in a tone Derek knew well, it was the one he used when he wanted something and was pretty sure Derek was going to disagree, a sort of wheedling plea that bobbed and elongated the last syllable of his name.

"Stiles," Derek answered, knowing full well he would agree to almost anything that Stiles suggested.

"Will you dream fast with me?" Stiles blurted it out so quickly the words seemed to trip over themselves in their urgency to be heard. He was referring to the practice where Derek could, using his claws, walk through Stiles' memories and enter his subconscious. It was how he had bound Balor. It was also an invasive procedure for both of them.

"We're not calling it that," Derek told the sky, it might listen for Stiles wouldn't.

"Then what do you suggest calling it, we need a term."

"Not that, you're not a gelfling." 

Stiles grinned, he liked it when Derek got his more obtuse references. "I dunno, I think you'd like me with pointy ears, you'd want me like a skeksis."

"Do you even hear yourself, the skeksis ate the gelfling."

"Hmmmmm?" Stiles impersonated the character, "hmmmmm," he was laughing as he did it, twisting towards Derek with his head, "a landstrider would be cool though."

"I wanted a Fizzgig," Derek admitted, "I got Cora instead."

Stiles' bark of laughter was like a balm to Derek's soul even as it scared a few native seabirds to flight. He laughed for a moment to himself before he said, "but really, I want you to do it, I want to know what happened."

  
"It's over," Derek said, "we can worry about it another time, let's just enjoy the day." Stiles agreed but it felt like a conversation deferred and not resolved. Stiles would ask again.

"I still say we should call it dream fasting, I mean it's the same thing." Then there was a pause, "do you think Jim Hensen was a werewolf?"

"Nah," Derek said, "but he probably knew one."

"Do you think there are famous werewolves?" It was the sort of nonsense question that could eat away at Stiles if he wasn't kept occupied and it was reassuring to hear it.

Derek turned his head to look at Stiles, "you didn't hear it from me, but Dolly Parton."

"No!" Stiles said and then a moment later, "you're shitting me aren't you, she's not and you're just saying she is because you know I'll believe it." Derek remained smugly magnanimous and said nothing. "I hate you," Stiles said pulling his feet out of the water so he could turn on his side, "you know I have to know and now I won't get it out of my head." He got to his feet, and picked up his sneakers, "I'll never hear Jolene again and not wonder if Dolly Parton isn't a werewolf." He was mock angry, "although it would explain a lot," he mused. "Also Kenny Rogers? He looks like he could be a werewolf."

"Not all werewolves look like Grizzly Adams," Derek told the sky, as Stiles sat down to tug on his sneakers without drying his feet first.

"I have my own cousin Itt Addams," Stiles said poking Derek in the armpit, "Does that make Peter Grizzly Addams?"

"Grizzly Adams wasn't one of the Addams," Derek was cut off by the radio on Stiles shoulder going off, "Stilinski, Hale, to command as soon as possible." Stiles rolled his eyes as if saying "they really can't do anything on their own," before he answered the radio with an affirmative. He waited a moment whilst Derek dried his feet, pulled on his socks, then his sneakers. "What can be so bad that they need our help? heavy lifting? passing messages? someone needs to watch the milk in the commissary so it doesn't boil over?"

"Maybe some notes need typing up for the server?" Derek offered. Since Stiles return it had been a whirlwind of busy work and small favours so them being asked to report was definitely odd enough.

\----

Sheppard looked like a man in desperate need of someone else's ration of coffee. And rum.

He looked tired in a way he never did. Even exhausted and about to collapse he didn't look tired, even when the stink of it was enough to make Derek pull his head back from the smell. Right then he looked done. McKay was in his labs and there had been no explosions that Derek knew of - so he wasn't to blame. The marines were geared up with Ronon and Lorne but the day had been quiet and apart from a single unscheduled off-world activation two days previous, as the last of the storm was swept away, nothing had been going on to make Sheppard look so tired.

"Stiles," Sheppard said with a deep sigh, "Is there something I should know?" he asked.

Stiles hadn't done anything that he wasn't supposed to so he answered flippantly, "don't ski through revolving doors."

Sheppard smiled at that and it took about ten years off his life, "I haven't heard that one before," he admitted, "have you had any contact with the Genii?" 

"You said they were on the no-fly list," Stiles answered, "so I wouldn't have." The Genii and the expedition were not quite mortal enemies but they were never going to be allies, they moved in different circles so that they didn't go to war.

"Two days ago we received a message through the stargate from the Genii arranging a meeting on a third party world of our choosing that they could uphold their end of a deal," Sheppard told them, "with you."

Stiles blinked back shock, then he went quiet, all traces of his good mood on the pier gone as he spoke. "I don't remember."

"I thought that was the case," Sheppard said, "I have a squad trying to find information on what happened but," he let out a breath Derek hadn't realised he was holding, "the Genii might have information, I want you to meet them, Hale, I want you and Ronon to accompany him, with these marines," he gestured with his head to the armed men, "but this is a diplomatic mission, this isn't a piss off the genii mission no matter how much we want it to be, too many of our allies also rely on the Genii for us to take that step. If Minister Cowan is there be on your best behaviour, I want you to behave like you were meeting the President, no smart mouthing, no taking the piss, I don't know what they want and I don't like that I don't know what they want, and right now we have a stalemate. If I could send anyone but you- I would, we have ambassadors for this kind of thing, Teyla is excellent but they specifically asked for you."

"I've never met a Genii," Stiles protested.

"Balor has," Sheppard answered, "and he struck up some kind of deal with them and that's why Teyla isn't going, Ronon is valuable to us, but Teyla has value to other races and they keep trying to kidnap our scientists. Don't agree to anything, tell them you don't have the authority, because you don't." He sounded like a parent sending a child off to grandma's and knew it, and resented it. Stiles wasn't a marine, he couldn't tell him what to do or how to behave, or even negotiate with him as he might with McKay, he had to hope for best behaviour from a kid with ADHD who often meant well as he set the world on fire. 

"Hale, you and Ronon are to make sure he doesn't get kidnapped," Sheppard scrubbed his face with his hand, "or if he gets kidnapped you go too, the last thing we need is another MIA for eight months whilst we try to explain to general O'Neill who gives us long messages every time we get email updates saying he wants to know what to tell your dad, it was hard enough looking for you without the additional pressure from someone who given the chance would drop everything on earth and come search for you and get kidnapped himself then I would have to go to Earth and explain to SECDEF how a general got himself kidnapped by something dumb like flying reindeer or Santa's elves."

"Get some sleep," Ronon said from the side of the room with a great sigh, "we've got this, the kid won't get snatched again, if the genii try it Hale will go all grrrr and the Genii will understand they brought it on themselves by pissing off a Tau'vol." 

Stiles looked like he was about to say something but decided against it. "I'll get geared up."

\---

Stiles didn't have an Atlantis uniform, because he wasn't an official member of the expedition, he was, officially, a prisoner there, but he did have one of the Antarctic consultant uniforms. It was a reflective metallic green quilted jacket and silky pants which had come with a hat, which he immediately lost - accidentally on purpose - to replace with a black beanie in Antarctica but left his head bare in Atlantis where the weather was more clement, so he swapped out the black thermal undershirt for a black tee and with every delivery from the Daedalus they promised him new uniforms, but they never came. Derek usually dressed like a marine but he had one of the shiny jackets too, in a blood-red because it had been the only one in the Antarctica stores when they got there that fit him and it was too cold to go without, even in the base.

When they went off-world they had sets of black BDUs, not that Stiles was allowed anywhere near a P90 - Derek had some combat training in Cheyenne springs - although he had a pistol and a knife as standard issue, so they went back ot their rooms changed quickly, and under Ronon's orders Stiles put on the green jacket. He was coming as an ambassador so they wanted him to look at least a little official.

On paper Stiles was twenty-one years old, in reality, he was nineteen and looked younger. He had an expression on his face like he was about to meet the principal and his principal had been Gerard Argent. Derek reached over from where he sat on their bed tying his laces and cupped Stiles' face in one hand and kissed him on the forehead, "we've got you," he said, "you're not going anywhere without me again."

Stiles smiled but he didn't lose the tightness around his eyes and kissed Derek back, full on the mouth, "I'm not even going to the toilet without you from now on."

\---

Kitted up Ronon looked exactly as he did on downtime and it was a reassuring piece of knowledge. He had spent years with the wraith hunting him for sport and had not only survived but learned. He could have been the most dangerous man in the universe and he was on their side. Even the genii soldiers were ill at ease with Ronon in the room. 

Stiles had also seen him sneak Torren, Teyla's son, earth candies despite his mother's argument against processed sugar. It was an open secret communicated in sticky grins and little fingers digging into pockets and climbing the man like a jungle gym. When he went to visit the Athosians Ronon was loaded with treats in his pockets that the children swarmed him for.

When he went off-world his pockets weren't full of candy but dangerous objects that he would use against his enemies. The marines were armed but Ronon was dangerous. 

They walked through the gate in formation into an empty field where a breeze stirred some ankle-deep grass under two small suns. The marines marched two by two, holding their P90s at alert, putting up a unified front to the Genii who appeared to be a willowy young man, perhaps no older than Stiles with terrible acne and muddy brown hair, and several soldiers. In front of them was a large wicker box.

When Stiles walked out, trying his best not to trip, the genii youth, who was wearing the clothes of a farmer, fell to his face in prostration causing the marines to train their weapons on him. "Lord on High, Devourer of the Unwary, He for Whom the Flame Burns, the Wind of High Summer that Drives Men Mad, the Whisperer in the hearth, that which stands eternal against the dark."

Stiles looked at Derek and mouthed "What the fuck?!" but said nothing out loud. 

"I think he's referring to you," one of the marines whispered to Ronon, who looked like he might have earned such titles in battle. 

"We are holding up our end of the agreement, Great One," the man continued, face still aimed at the grass in this random field of an unpopulated world. "We have gathered all that you have asked for, we have done all that you wished. We ask that you accept our offering and remember us in your imaginings."

The marines started to mutter amongst themselves when Ronon nudged Stiles with his shoulder, "open it," he said. "The Genii are terrible at bombs."

Derek rolled his eyes at Stiles' horrified expression and stepped forward, pointing his P90 at the ground as he did so. "I'll do it," he said, his thought was that he would heal where the others would not. With the tip of his P90, he flipped open the lid and revealed books, bound in fabric, scrolls in hardened cases, others were the two spindles were tied together with silk ribbon. They were packed in as tight as they could be. "It's books," Derek said looking back to the soldiers.

"As was requested." The Genii said but didn't lift his head to look at them. "The Fire in the Morning Sky came through the Ring of the Ancestors with a child, he demanded to speak to Grand Chancellor Cowan, he offered the skull of a wraith queen in exchange. He wished for the books from Sateda that we had in our stores and a home for the child. He said that he had destroyed the Oudra and come across the queen in his quest. Do you not know this?" The Genii looked to be almost in tears. "He stands there amongst you." He pointed at Stiles who looked like he might bolt back through the gate at a moment's notice.

"We knew him for he spoke to us of the old times before the Wraith, he could activate the machines in the darkest part of the planet. He pulled the Wraith down from the sky like they were paper toys. He laughed at our attempts to destroy them. He offered his aid and we have met his price." It was not duty that moved this man to almost tears - it was terror. He was on the verge of pissing himself just from standing near Stiles and being found to have cheated him in his bargain.

Balor had definitely been here- and he had manipulated the Genii - and his price was a box of books.

"The library of Sateda," Ronon said moving forward to run his finger along the spine of one of the book, the two fabric covers were stitched around the spine but there was no hard ridge to protect the edge of the pages, "was full of volumes, people came from many different worlds to read their pages. It is a wondrous offering indeed." It was unclear to Derek if Ronon had adopted the formal speech deliberately or not. "Does Cowan consider this an equal payment for the services rendered?" 

Ronon was from Sateda, these books would mean more to him than anyone else.

"Grand Minister Cowan asks that the Eater of Death remembers this gesture and that he has agreed to a truce on this planet, a mutual place for trade and knowledge and that he will give any aid that the Lanteans want to build that which they think necessary for the exchange of goods and knowledge." That sounded rehearsed and formal.

Stiles looked baffled but Ronon nudged him with his shoulder to speak. "Tell Grand Minister Cowan his truce is noted and will hold true, this planet shall be marked as neutral and that a truce will be enforced here that all worlds shall enjoy trade and the opportunity for shared learning as each world sees fit to share." 

Stiles had heard horror stories of the Genii, of how they took scientists to try and steal the secret of dynamite from them in order to build a nuclear bomb. He didnt think that Sheppard would be happy if he offered them that information. Nukes did little to the wraith anyway. "I must take these offerings back to the city of the Ancients," Stiles said, "and carry word that the agreement has been met."

"Lord Svarog," the Genii stammered, attracting Stiles' attention, "your blessing is most welcome, but I also bring my own thanks, you saved my parents when the sickness which afflicted them so has faded, as you said that it would. The device that my people were making, you were right, we had to abandon it. Your actions in defending us from the wraith, I know they don't mean anything to you, but they mean a lot to me, so thank you." Then, he scuttled backwards towards his own armed forces. He did this without leaving his prostrate pose with his head between his hands almost touching the floor leaving Stiles more baffled than he had been before he had come through the gate.

This Genii was terrified of him. He had done something to the wraith. He had delivered the skull of a Queen. He had told the Genii to stop their work on radioactive material and had enough power that they listened. They had just found every book of Satedan origin that they had and announced that Stiles had negotiated a neutral planet for trade and he remembered none of it and none of it sounded like Balor.

But the Genii had called him the "Eater of Death," and that sounded exactly like him.

\---

Back in Atlantis Sheppard seemed as baffled as Stiles, repeating the summary of it over and over in the hope someone would break and reveal it as a complicated practical joke. "So Grand Minister Cowan arranged a meeting to deliver a box of books?"

"Yes," Derek told him. 

Ronon had taken the basket and refused to let anyone touch them, carrying them through the gate and immediately going past everyone to his room.

"And they weren't boobytrapped or poisoned or irradiated?" Sheppard was being careful to check everything.

"No," Derek told him, "we checked it thoroughly before brining it back through the gates. 

"And the books were Satedan?"

"Each and every one," Stiles filled in.

"And the Genii looked fit to," he looked at his tablet, "piss himself with fear."

"Yup," Cortez, the commander of the marines who had gone through the gate said with a smile.

"I don't know which of us is on crazy pills, me, you or Cowan." Sheppard scrubbed his hand over his face with a long drawn out sigh. "Cowan, a man who has promised to kill us all and take the city, is arranging covert meetings to give out boxes of books?" No matter how he worded it Sheppard couldn't make it sound less crazy.

"It was a big box," Stiles offered, "and Ronon seemed pleased."

Sheppard sighed and leaned forward on his desk. He hated his desk but sometimes you needed the gravitas of a desk, this was one of those situations where the desk was the only thing reassuring him he had not been accidentally put into a version of Atlantis where down was up because in that version he was sure he wouldn't have the desk. His office was nice, it had its own electric kettle and selection of teas, some of which were from Earth and given to him by Woolsey. There was a bottle of spirits in the desk drawer which he thought that people didn't know about, and he had sworn he wouldn't have when he got the desk but Atlantis just had the sort of days where having a glass of the bootleg Vodka - which could be used as a degreaser for the puddle jumpers it was that strong - was just the thing.

"Do you think your dad would mind if I asked him and O'Neill to join them fishing?" He asked Stiles, thinking a few days peace sounded to be just the thing. He wasn't the sort of man who enjoyed fishing, he preferred golf, but a few days quiet with beer and conversation and toasted marshmallows was fast becoming his idea of paradise.

"I wouldn't know," Stiles said a little archly. "I don't get to talk to my dad, but seeing as you're holding him hostage for my good behaviour."

Sheppard really needed a drink right then. "No, we're not." He said firmly.

"Why then does General O'Neill keep checking up on him, he keeps mentioning him in his emails and I'm not stupid, Sheppard, I know I'm a prisoner here, I understand that, I even understand why I wanna go home but I know it's not going to happen and I get why, I don't like it but I get it, and the only leverage you have is my dad."

It was at times like this Sheppard both lamented that he was an atheist because he had no divine power to curse out and was painfully reminded Stiles was just a kid. His experiences had matured him, but he was still just a kid. Sheppard wondered what he had been doing at Stiles' age and was at college getting drunk and making mistakes he would learn from. There was no one his age in the city, just Hale and a few marines with five years or more on him. No wonder he spent as long as he did on the mainland.

"They're friends. O'Neill went from being surrounded by people as close as family to Washington where he has to act as a secret bridge between the SECDEF and the SGC whilst dodging the IOA and the Trust, he went from being able to shoot all of his problems to having to negotiate, a thing he hates, and he found someone he could talk to frankly who shared one of his few escapes. It sounds ridiculous but grown-ups have friends too." He felt old. He felt old to his bones as he said it and Stiles was clearly still sceptical. 

"I wanna see my dad," he said and Sheppard couldn't argue. Stiles and his father were close and Stiles had been missing for eight months, even if it had only been days to him. "If I'm not a prisoner, I wanna go visit my dad."

"Okay," Sheppard said and started looking around on his tablet for the paperwork, "I'll book the two of you a space on the next Daedalus run, it'll be a while, it's not due to dock for another eighty days, but you have a space on it."

Stiles didn't look like he believed him. "Stiles, you're here because this is the best place for you, both because you have more value here to the expedition than you did in Antartica or Colorado, you have achieved more here," he emphasised the word, "and that's you, not Ba'al, or whoever it is that possesses you." He was sure that Stiles needed to hear it, "you and Hale both. I know it seems like we don't take it seriously enough, I know we forget that you have extenuating circumstances, but you are not a prisoner here, you are an asset, like Teyla or Ronon. If nothing else your evil twin has negotiated the truce we wanted for a central hub world for trade." Sheppard sighed, "now get out of my office and go see Carson, he'll want to do your post off-world check-up and I don't want to be seen drinking on the job."


	7. Chapter 7

Stiles was keeping himself busy by helping the xenobotanists type up their notes because each of them kept a tiny journal in which they wrote with the worst handwriting Stiles had seen.

The city had a central database of all the information but it meant that the botanists, a group of people who considered fire to be a form of witchcraft but you could take their microscopes from their dead hands under their barrow of brightly coloured mushrooms had to type them up after the fact.

Most of the scientists kept their notes on their tablets but the xenobotanists, a group that kept themselves to themselves for the most part so they could gush about ferns to people who would also gush about ferns, did not. Derek had befriended them when he was starting his garden and they had let him into their little clique and where Derek went, Stiles followed.

Stiles had free time, they had copious sets of notes to type up, it was an easy calculation. Sometimes it involved standing with a tape measure but mostly it was easy to work sat next to someone who could translate their drunken scrawl. Derek couldn't help but look up every couple of minutes from where he was keeping his own gardening log to make sure he was still there when he couldn't hear him talk.

Teyla came in, paused and looked around, as if checking who was present before she walked over to Derek, nodding to Stiles and Dr Sagawa on her way. "I was hoping that I might discover you here," Teyla said to Derek with a polite bow of the head. Derek felt she was more uneasy with him than the other members of the expedition, but her people had legends of the Tau'vol and they weren't unlike those of Earth werewolves. "I wish to invite you, and Stiles, on behalf of the ancestors to the festival of Maslenitsa."

Derek was a little surprised. The anthropologists had been griping about how they wished to attend the festival for as long as he had been in Atlantis, and possibly before. No one from the city had been invited to take part. Almost nothing was known about the festival other than that it took place in what had been deep midwinter and the gate had translated it's true name to the nearest Earth equivalent, Maslenitsa, which was a Russian festival taking place before Lent designed to use up winter foods before the lenten fast, like a variant of Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday.

When the Athosians left Athos with the expedition first to Lantea, then New Lantea they had brought their festivals and traditions with them. So Maslenitsa, which was traditionally a winter festival was happening at the start of fall.

"You've never invited anyone from the expedition before," Derek said, surprised enough it fell from his mouth.

"None has ever needed it before," she said, "on behalf of my people I would like to invite you, Derek, to take the role of monitor and you, Stiles," she looked over at him with that queenly smile of hers, "as a participant, if you are willing." 

Stiles' mouth was hung open, making him look rather like a fish.

"We would be honoured," Derek answered for him, "all you have to do is tell us where and when."

"The anthropologists will shiv you, Stiles" Dr Sagawa muttered. Derek could not help the growl that rumbled deep in his throat, "or they'll shiv Derek who will get in the way of the knife."

"They're anthropologists," Stiles answered, "it won't be a shiv, it'll be a sharpened bone covered in runes."

The Athosians were private about their festivals and the anthropologists were rarely welcomed.

It was a surprise that anyone was invited, let alone Derek and Stiles.

\---

After the invitation Stiles seemed quieter than usual, he seemed unaware of it and when roused out of his reverie would respond with a bright smile that seemed a little forced to Derek. He read books, carrying a paperback he had found somewhere stuck in his back pocket, and tucked himself into quiet corners mouthing along with the words or concentrating so hard the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He left his rations of coffee to go cold in the cup. He didn't really eat, picking at his food and moving it around the plate so it looked like he had eaten more than he had. 

Derek used to the signs said nothing but tucked himself in beside Stiles reading from his tablet about PH levels and water tables to better manage his garden, and trying to find a way to use water more efficiently. When he felt his mind going blank from boredom he switched to the virtual library of fiction that the expedition kept in its central core. He would give Stiles his coffee ration when Stiles' went cold.

Peter had once told Derek not to underestimate the power of human love and there was a truth to it. Derek was now in another galaxy, light years away from everything he knew, because it was what was best for Stiles. Derek could have walked away. He had tried once, but there was no underestimating the power of human love.

The night terrors continued unabated, even when Beckett had medicated Stiles into sleep. The more frantic he got in sleep the more the lights fluctuated badly enough he was encouraged to sleep in the medbay which was on another circuit to the apartments. He still screamed "don't look at me" like he might burst into tears and when he woke he clutched at Derek tight as he could.

Sitting in the garden, rereading his paperback Stiles started to hum tunelessly. There was a light patter of rain on the glass tiles and the greenhouse had a damp almost swampy feel, but Stiles had tucked himself unto one of the planter benches.

The beans were ready for harvest so Derek found his basket and started to pick them loose from the vines, each releasing a burst of sweetness as he broke them free. He was listening for Stiles, focussing on the steady thump of his heart, threadier than he would like but still strong and healthy, when Stiles started singing. It was the quiet sort of tunelessness that suggested he was concentrating on other things but the song was stuck in his head. "Just a perfect day," he mumble-sung, "Drink sangria in the park."

Derek had learned to recognise when the other memories were close to the surface when Stiles himself was more distant. As the Athosian festival loomed he seemed to retreat further and further into the memories of the other people. When startled by McKay asking him what a device was he answered in medieval Russian. He dragged his fingers along the polished walls of the city and sang to himself songs Stiles, when asked, didn't know.

"and then later, when it gets dark," Stiles continued, "we go home."

Derek was torn between alerting Stiles to the fact that he was singing and just leaving him there, singing to himself, unaware of it - and he almost certainly didn't know what he was singing. 

"Just a perfect day, feed animals in the zoo, then later, a movie too, and then home." He turned the page of his paperback, "oh its such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you, oh such a perfect day," then the tone of the song changed slightly, "you just keep me hanging on, you just keep me hanging on."

They weren't alone in the garden, Dr Kusanagi had set up a go board - she invited Stiles to play with her but he flinched before he refused - replaying the transcripts of games that she got in her weekly email dump as she drank a sweet Athosian tea, with her legs crossed in front of her and half a doughnut. 

Hearing Stiles sing and knowing the words, as lost in her game as Stiles was in her book she started to sing along. It was not a song that Derek knew but Miko did.

"Just a perfect day, you made me forget myself, I thought I was, someone else, someone good."

Derek wanted to drop the basket in the dirt, to leap over the chamomile border and fold Stiles up in his arms as he sang, unaware, along with the memory in his head. 

And lost in the game of Go on the other side of the planter Dr Miko Kusanagi sang along, tunelessly and almost as an after thought a strange song about a perfect day. Derek would ask her about it later. Some wicked thought in the back of his head asked Derek which of the victims of the Darach had been the one to like it, the history teacher, the doctor or one of the kids, then he admonished himself for it because there was cruelty there he didn't want to acknowledge. It might have been Paige, he thought. 

In those quiet hours of the long dark when Stiles had been gone he had run through every dark thought, did Stiles love him because he had to, because of their bond, or because Stiles remembered what she remembered and she loved him. Was it Stiles' own love or was it the memory of a teenage girl who died in the roots of a possessed tree, her life cut short by Derek's own hand turning his eyes blue?

The dark of the night was the time for such thoughts and he banished them with the chime from the room telling him it was time to get up.

Now Stiles was back and singing his strange, sad song, unaware perhaps that he was singing, and that Dr Kusanagi was singing along with him.

Derek would later hear, that with the song stuck in her head, Miko would walk past Brandi's apartment where the baby was screaming, and hearing the tune she quietened for the first time in days.

\---

The Athosian festival of Maslenitsa was their celebration of midwinter. Teyla had explained it as a thanks to their ancestors in celebrating that the new year would bring life and joy. She explained that late winter and spring was a time of growing but autumn and early winter was a time of dying when fruit and crops planted in the spring had reached the end of their growth. The two festivals, Maslenitsa in midwinter and Kupala in midsummer were kept even when other, more modern festivals were lost in the times between wraith culls.

Kupala was a sombre affair involving fasting and an ululation, a mourning for the coming loss but Maslenitsa was a massive celebration with bonfires and days of feasting ending in music and dancing.

Stiles, as a celebrant, was whisked away with the other young people whilst Derek was gathered by the other monitors. It was not explained to him what it was he needed to keep an eye on but he quickly gathered that the celebrants were given a specific wine, called Winterbrine, and the monitors had no alcohol but instead worked cutting the last of the winter apples and pressing the mash between sackcloths which would make a sharp cider for Kupala.

As they worked the monitors, which included a range of ages and genders, with cats and dogs sat at their feet in the hope of scraps, told stories. Legends of the Athosian people were bandied about with the oldest amongst them saying "that's not how it goes," and laughter with a light argument about whether the sacred flower was red or blue. 

The people of Athos formed tribes but they were family in a way that the expedition was not and it was reassuring to Derek who hadn't had family in a long time and there was little difference between these aliens preparing food and bickering over fairy tales than a family in California making Christmas dinner.

An old woman, with a brightly patterned fabric scarf about her head and a face wrinkled like a walnut, sat next to Derek and kept passing him some of the special cakes they were given to eat, commenting how a strong young man like him needed to eat and be full of joy. The cakes were small and made of a nut flour from a tree not entirely unlike a beech, mixed with cream cheese and butter and flavoured with something that tasted like Turkish delight. They were pressed in moulds and baked and almost crumbled in the hand but melted in the mouth sweet and savoury all at the same time with a snowflake motif on the top.

Every now and again Derek could hear the bright peal of Stiles' laughter reassuring him that he was well.

It was possible that, alongside preparing the Winterbrine, that Stiles was also being fed the little cakes in an attempt to fatten him up for the hard months of late winter. Maybe a little old lady had adopted him too and was slipping him extra treats, like slices of winter withered apples, as she hung the peels on a rack by the fire to dry after dousing them in a sweet spice.

Maslenitsa was a festival of excess, where bellies were stuffed full of rich foods and fatty meats and delightful cakes, with tea made from the spiced dried peel of the apples. There were stories and one farmer, tucked into a corner by the fire, sat on baled hay, asleep with the knife in his hand, lightly snoring despite the noise.

The Athosians had struck Derek as a sort of bucolic fantasy, some pastoral idyll whose only true woe was the wraith, but they had a welcoming nature and invited everyone as family until they were hurt, and then they were ferocious. 

Halling had issues with the expedition, mostly from keeping them from the gate "for their own protection", and they kept the expedition, especially the anthropologists who couldn't quite get past seeing them as papers to be written, at arm's length but Derek felt included. As he had time and he could fly a puddle jumper - his own iteration of the ancient gene seemed to be linked to him being a Tau'vol instead of Tau'ri - he was happy to use his free time to help, and in exchange, they taught him farming.

Even their festivals involved work, Stiles came in, dressed in a light cotton shirt and pants with a fur over his shoulders, carrying a tray of fresh fish, stuffed with butter and herbs sitting on slabs of warm from the oven rye bread, one slice for each of them. An Athosian girl carried in a winter fruit, not entirely unlike quince, which had been baked with butter and sugar and served with thickly whipped white cream.

Maslenitsa was a feast of butter and animal fat and all the foods that they would have hoarded over the winter.

When night fell elaborate bonfires had been laid out by those who were neither participants or monitors and the participants came forward, into the circles of light, barefoot and in white cotton, veiled like ghosts, and the drum beat started, three quick beats then a heavier, thicker beat on a different drum and each of the participants, Stiles included, took a small beaker of a clear liquid and swallowed it down. Then with the drum beating and the fires blazing they began to dance.

"How do they know?" Derek began because it looked to him that even Stiles knew the steps.

"The winterbrine," Halling said beside him. Halling was a tall, rangy man with a ginger beard and a quiet voice that brooked no argument. "It connects them with the ancestors, they dance for what has been lost and they dance for that which grows." Halling offered Derek a cup of wine, pouring it liberally, before he continued, "we watch so that they might dance free of concern so that they can thank those who have been and give honour to those who are yet to come."

Teyla bracketed Derek on the other side, offering him slices of the warm rye bread, thickly smeared with butter and honey, "you worry," she said, "but you do not need to. Watch," she was so calm even as the second drum had a sort of freneticism that Stiles was echoing in his movements. "The winterbrine will not hurt him," she said softly, "and if it did you are there to catch him." She sounded so soft and placating, "in the city they will have you talk, and talk and name the things which draw you down, but there are things that we do not have words for, emotions we cannot express with talking, here, in thedance, he can give all of those emotions, all of the things he cannot say or will not be said, and none to hear him but the ancestors. All of his rage and fear and exhaustion and other things we cannot know, for he himself does not, he can let it free and wild and lost to the dance."

She took a sip of her own hot wine before she continued, "I told you I had not invited any from the city because they did not need what the ceremony offered. I believed it would aid him, that it would aid both of you. Now eat, this is a festival, watch him dance, and when he stops be there to catch him." 

There was an orgiastic abandon to the dancers, and Derek could not have said how it was that they knew how to move between each other and the bonfires like they were drifting snowflakes.

Eventually, the hot spiced wine and the drum beat and a full belly wove their spell even on Derek, who watched Stiles with a naked hunger, for the way he moved and twisted and jumped and wove in and out of the other dancers, their feet bare on the hard packed soil, and damp, even from this distance, with sweat. Derek could smell and taste it even over the rich food, the spiced wine, the sweet smell of the wood-burning, salty-sour on his tongue and he wanted.

Since Stiles had returned he hadn't been in the right state of mind for sex, he fell into bed after exhausting himself, curling into Derek like they were two blocks worn smooth by a torrential river cutting away all the places where they did not fit. He tucked himself into Derek and clung tight until he woke yelling "don't look at me," with the city lights flickering with his unconscious mind.

Derek loved Stiles, he loved him absolutely and totally. Stiles saw him. He saw through the rage and the hurt and he was kind and he didn't see a monster. Even when Derek was monstrous.

When Derek was monstrous Stiles was kind.

How could Derek not love him?

Then there was the desire, the smell and taste and feel of him, long-waisted, slim-hipped with wide shoulders, and the long strong knuckled hands of a man. He had eyes whose colour changed from warm butter to darkest night as the light hit them. He had a mouth soft like slices of fruit and the space behind his ears haunted Derek. He had skin like a peach and would burst out laughing if Derek licked his belly button. 

He laughed with his whole body, throwing himself forward with the sheer delight of laughing. He showed every emotion with Derek, baring himself as if there was nothing in him that Derek would not love - and he was right.

It had been eight months and the loss had not done much to quell Derek's desire. He wanted but he could not have and that had made the desire sharper.

But the Stiles who had come back through the stargate was broken in the way the Stiles who had gone missing was not. He was healing and that meant Derek did not push. He was waiting for Stiles to initiate sex and he would wait as long as he had to.

He wanted, but Derek was used to not getting what he wanted.

He had walked in Stiles' mind, he had seen the very heart and core of him. He did not doubt that he was loved and that he loved in return. He had followed Stiles through a wormhole to another galaxy and a planet with three moons - it was certainly love.

Derek had nothing on Earth. He had a sister who despised him and an uncle who he could not trust, but here, on New Lantea, he had Stiles and that was enough for him.

And Stiles was dancing. The winterbrine had given his motion an elegance that he lacked in everyday life.

As one of the girls moved past Derek he saw that her face was wet with tears.

Teyla had said that there were three nights of dancing, one for those who had been, one for those that were and one for those that would be. Yet she had also said that it was a way to take all those feelings that people could not express and let them out. Perhaps this silent weeping was a natural part of the dance too.

One of the dancers was little more than a child, barely into puberty, with wild hair under her veil and sleeves longer than the others. "her name is Udein," Teyla said, "she dances every year. Her family was taken in a cull," there was a pause, "and she lives with her greatmother," Teyla's gaze found the old lady who had spent the day feeding Derek treats, "soon we shall start to train her as a pathfinder, she has such rage that she will not be content amongst the farms, as I was not." Something in the way that Teyla said it carried a deep sadness. "Sometimes we are angry at the things we cannot change, so with both hands we grab the things that we can, she shall be a great pathfinder and may find peace in her way, as I did."

There was a tragedy and sweetness to her dance that many of the others did not share. She was wild in a way that others were not, the only other who seemed to share her rage was Stiles. Their steps seemed more frenetic, more primal, than those of the other dances. Derek wondered if it was because of their rage, their trauma and their pain.

Teyla had told him that the dance was a way to ease that rage; a way for the body to express what the voice could not, and that the winterbrine would grease the way.

"For whom," Teyla asked, "is it that he dances?" She was watching Stiles, at the freneticism of his movements, as if she could read it in a way that he could not. It was possible she understood it having once been a dancer herself.

"His mother," Derek said, "she died when he was a child," perhaps the smell of the burning wood, or the fullness in his belly, or the sweet fruit tea he had been drinking eased his tongue for he continued to talk, "she was ill, she saw demons and monsters," he could speak of her illness with dispassion because it had not happened to him, he had not known her, "she thought he was a monster. She tried several times to kill him, it's what led to her death, she was drowning him and she was shot to save him. He was alone at her bedside when she died." It was strange to Derek how impassive he could be, "I think he blames himself."

"It is natural that he do so," Halling said in his calm, stentorious tone that made Derek feel so at ease, "to a child the world is theirs and what happens in that world, small as it is, they can attribute to their own actions. He is not to blame, no more than his mother for the sickness that ravaged her but the heart believes what the mind knows to be untrue."

"How long does the dance last?" Derek asked, the bonfires were already burning low, and many of the dancers had drifted from the centre to be coddled by what Derek assumed to be their monitors.

"Until the rage is spent," Teyla answered. "And tomorrow they shall dance for their present, but the third dance is the sweetest," she said, "for then they dance with hope, other dancers will remain longer, for not all have the rage, or the frustration of the first night, and some have the steadfast knowledge of the second, yet those who dance for their futures, they are the ones to see."

"How do you know which is which?" Derek asked.

"By watching."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, is this a note  
> so I was alerted to the fact that this story shares some similarities with the H. rider Haggard novel "She" and went, okay, picked a quote from Goodreads that fit and intended to go on with my life, I hadn't read the book, my only knowledge of it was a vague memory of Ursula Andress in a film I saw as little more than a toddler at my aunt's house [suggesting she was watching it when I came in], I knew it was the source of "she-who-must-be-obeyed" and that was that. Finding the quote I had to google the author  
> but like any thing like that it started to niggle, and eat away at me, so I got the book [a lovely penguin edition with a gorgeous art nouveau cover] and read it, and went OH!SHIT! for the two are SO alike, and I panicked  
> then I started reading AROUND the book, essays etc because it turns out this book was like the font of all evil villainesses - you want a sexy sorceress that has minions and does evil - thank Ayesha.  
> And when I broke down the plot into actions instead of character and tone it's the plot of Stargate Atlantis  
> basically what I did was add Lovecraft [who was inspired by She for Dreams in the Witch House among others, the underground ruined cities come from this book] so basically heaped on another layer  
> which as you can imagine made things worse  
> But this chapter was always meant to contain the festival, and I knew that when I was planning that the festival was going to be there, and it would be like the dance of the Wilis in Giselle, but guess what is also in She, the white robed dancers stepping in between the bonfires. I decided to just roll with it, there's only so much you can do  
> I hadn't read She, I have since read She, I rec you read it, it's fun, it's on project Gutenberg for free, but be prepared for your brain to go = omg this is like the proto fantasy, all the books I have read are a lie, jeez even Tolkien ripped this book off, so if nothing else, I'm in good company.
> 
> Winterbrine is the drug in Notenuffcaffeine's excellent Genetic Drift that is also a teen wolf star gate atlantis xover


	8. Interlude

McKay was the last to the briefing table and even then he had a gadget in his hand that he was trying to repair, or rebuild, Sheppard hadn't asked. 

Sheppard had been having a good day.

Sometimes everything came together so sublimely that you just knew the shit was going to hit the fan - hard.

With a message from Brewer, the A/V guy whose job mostly consisted of trying to set up the intergalactic skype for a city full of people to be sent through the ten-second window that the gate bridge was open, the shit hit the fan. "I've got some footage off the kino." That was the internal email. That was all it needed so Sheppard arranged a meeting in the conference room, he cc-ed Woolsey but he didn't think he'd attend but he liked Woolsey to think he was being included. Last he heard Woolsey was working his way through the list of books he had always intended to read but never got around to before. It was like a peaceful retirement for him where occasionally he sent reports to the IOA that Lorne had authored for him.

Woolsey didn't attend.

Stiles and Derek were on the mainland with Teyla but Ronon, who normally attended the festival, was present, as was Lorne, Zelenka and McKay. Ronon had been quiet since the package from the Genii had arrived. It was a collection of works from Sateda, most of which had been art, and it was likely he was feeling homesick for a world that no longer existed. The wraith had scoured it and burned it to the ground so that only ash and twisted metal remained to stand as a testament to those who defied them. It was possible that Ronon had not considered that other worlds might have things which had been Satedan. Sheppard didn't know why it was that Balor, because they were adamant it wasn't Stiles, had asked for it as part of his ransom.

Brewer had set up his laptop, leaving the kino in his lab. "I worked with Zelenka on this," Brewer admitted causing McKay to make a huff, Sheppard had specifically refused McKay access to the kino until everything could be removed from its memory. McKay was a genius, he could have restored it, but they didn't want to restore it right then- they wanted to datamine it.

Sheppard had heard about that decision, at length. But for the most part, McKay didn't argue with him loudly in public. McKay was itching to get his hands on the kino because it was tech he knew existed but had never before seen.

"We got three pieces of footage, but this is the only one we've decrypted so far." He used a remote control that McKay had rigged to lower the lights so that the laptop could project on the wall, Sheppard didn't understand the mechanics of it. He liked machines to turn on when he pushed the button and knowing that they did what they were meant to do when he wanted them to do it. The city constantly breaking after ten thousand years of disuse was McKay and Zelenka's problem, and with the sewage treatment being temperamental it wasn't like McKay wasn't kept busy.

The image was of Stiles' back, he was wearing black BDU's, not the wool he had returned in, but they were ragged and the kino was just above knee height. "I think it's held by a child," Lorne whispered to Ronon, "we know there were children."

Stiles turned and leaned down to say something but there was no sound, "he's telling them to close their eyes," Brewer said, "it's an occupational hazard learning to lipread, he's telling them to be sure not to look."

Sheppard leaned forward because even if the children had been told not to look the kino had been unflinching in its gaze. Three wraith came out of the darkness, greenish-white even through the heavy filters on the footage. Stiles talked to them for a moment or two and then, without Stiles turning back to the kino or the children it happened.

The heads of the wraith exploded like a balloon popping. There wasn't much footage after that, just Stiles walking forward into the wraith ship.

"Holy Fuck!" McKay said, wide-eyed and fish mouthed.

"God damn," Ronon, who had learned to swear from the marines said, slapping his thigh with delight. "show it again!" he said, "that's!" he seemed genuinely speechless. Then he started to laugh. "Like an egg in the microwave."

Sheppard could not believe what he had seen. Stiles hadn't moved, there had been no gesture, no device. He had, ostensibly, spoken to the wraith and their heads had popped, and that was the word, like the scene in Scanners, only without the preamble. 

The only one who didn't seem particularly surprised was Lorne and everyone turned to look at him, not even Lorne was that nonchalant. "It was in his file," Lorne said, "one in high school when a guy held a gun to his head, he blew out the guy's head although an FBI officer thought he might have done it, but when they investigated the kill there was no way he could have. The second was a Trust agent who looked at him through a sniper rifle when he was at college. He had a huge file on Stiles, probably trying to work out why the SGC was interested in him; used a sniper scope instead of a telescope and," he stuck his finger into his mouth and pulled it out making a noise.

"He's been threatened loads of times since being here." McKay protested. He had personally threatened Stiles just last week over a crystal array.

"But Derek has been here," Lorne said quietly. "As far as we understand Derek keeps Balor in hibernation, no Derek and," he made the pop sound again. "Balor protects his host."

On the screen, on a wraith ship deep in space Balor told the children to close their eyes.


	9. Addendum - cut for tone - not necessary to read but has a lot of backstory exposition

CUT FOR TONE

Stiles Stilinski was possessed on his seventeenth birthday. He would later admit he was having nightmares about the ancient as early as the start of October. Considering what he had experienced that year, at the time he chalked it up to anxiety and disregarded the magical ritual that he had been talked into by an adult that he trusted.

This trust proved false as the adult in question, a local vet who knew about the supernatural, had been worshipping the Ancient for at least ten years and looking for a host for his master as long. 

On the day before Halloween, Mischief night, which was the anniversary of Stiles' birth, he was possessed by the Ancient after an altercation with a flawed vessel in an electrical substation. 

He suspected that the visions and black outs were a side effect of his chronic insomnia and went to the hospital from where he went missing, sleepwalking into the woods where he was missing for over twenty four hours. On being rescued he returned to the hospital where the Ancient took control completely having coerced Stiles into cedeing control. 

Over the following three days the ancient attacked a school teacher - for making him run laps apparently - and planted a bomb at the police station where Derek had been waiting. It remained unclear if the Ancient knew of Derek's capacity to bind him and was taking an opportunity to remove him or it was just bad luck on Derek's part.

Captured Stiles was taken to Eichen House where an orderly sedated him with halperidol and all hell broke loose. Over the next seven days the Ancient killed fifteen people, mostly police officers and hospital staff, but they managed to bind it with luck more than actual ability. It had in its brief period of control killed twenty people and injured equally as many.

Daniel Jackson later suggested that it was possible that Dereks' presence, even though the second ritual, if it could be called that, had not taken place, had damped down the Ancient and kept the body count that low.

Footage of the hospital massacre, where fifteen people died, showed him walking through the corridors as bodies were flung around him, ripping themselves open even when he did not look in their direction. There was no physical evidence that he had been anything other than present. General O'Neill, in a private aside with General Landry, said it looked like it was out of one of those found footage horror movies.

\---

In his final year at high school a group of interdimensional beings snatched Stiles and kept him for nine months, which he claimed felt like one day. This attracted the attention of the SGC who believed that an eye should be kept. He had enough credits to graduate high school so they offered him a place at a university close to Creek Mountain where he could be monitored. Over the summer between high school and college he was sounded out by members of the SGC in regards to what had happened to him and if he might be a go'a'uld in disguise.

He had knowledge that they couldn't explain but combined with it was chronic insomnia, a fear of sleep, somnambulism when he did sleep and a personality that they described as quixotic. Later it would be obvious that he was manifesting the Ancient even when he didn't mean to, although at that time he believed it to be dead. He attended a local psychiatrist, not knowing it was affiliated with the SGC, in regards to PTSD although he was cagy about the reasons for it.

Under the guise of treating his PTSD they ran tests and found him to have a much higher than average instance of the ATA gene. Questions were raised about the equivalent high IQs that seemed to accompany that result but it went nowhere - this might have had something to do with General O'Neill, who was in the top 1% of high gene carriers, accidentally locking himself in a public bathroom and calling a base wide crisis to get him free.

The decision was made to swear Stiles in on a non-disclosure and due to his age - missing year notwithstanding - the decision included swearing in his father after acquiring, with military force, the Beacon Hills police reports and affadavits from certain police officers and one FBI agent who was on the scene.

The SGC made the decision that "werewolves" were not a matter of concern to the IOA.

Curious about these genetic anomalies and fuelled with Teal'c's legends of animal headed guards who served before the Jaffa and upon whom the helmets of the Go'a'uld gave their personal guard. Teal'c admitted he did not know who had created that technology, because the Jaffa had for centuries believed the Go'a'uld lies not seeing them as scavengers who had used what they found regardless of source.

Dr Jackson discovered a series of myths from Earth History in regard to animal shapeshifters and managed to convince General Landry that it might be worth recruiting one for more information. Dr Jackson, it should be noted, had no intention of dissecting one even if some of the other scientists in the SGC did.

The decision was made to invite Derek Hale to the SGC which meant finding him, a task made more complicated by him being framed as a serial murderer, when even a child could see that he had not been present, or in the state, for some of the crimes for which he stood accused.

With Stiles knowing about what he called the supernatural, and which Dr Jackson insisted on calling the preternatural, which was the start of a bickering war between the two. Vala Mal Doran was reported to have threatened to turn the SUV around and "you don't want me have to go back there."

As General O'Neill explained to Sheriff Stilinski, on one of their getaway trips - they had become instant best friends over this shared interest in sitting at the side of the water drinking beer and not catching anything - Dr Jackson was used to being the person with all of the answers. Since the Stargate program was started Daniel Jackson was the one who knew things, he was often the first one to realise what was happening when it had to do with history or anthropology and Stiles knew more than him, because the thing inside him knew more.

The sheriff did try to explain that it wasn't that Stiles knew, but that he had access to the abcient's memories which could be triggered but General O'Neill pointed out that for several years Stiles had been neck deep in "werewolf malarkey" - he specifically used those words - and so he had experience that Dr Jackson didn't, so where Daniel was trying to find answers he was often contradicted by a kid.

Derek Hale was rescued by order of the US Military showing up at the FBI stakeout where they intended to- but would later deny- shoot to kill. It involved Colonel Mitchell trying to talk them down whilst Vala Mal Doran ran into the warehouse where they had Hale imprisoned following Stiles who had stolen an FBI coat to sneak through the line and rescue Hale on his own.

This resulted in Hale carrying Stiles out of the resulting firefight after Stiles got shot - in the foot.

He was sworn in in the back of an SUV and given the low down not by a stargate official but an excitable eighteen year old who interspersed every sentence with I missed you so much.

It was apparent to everyone who knew Stiles that just by being close to Hale he was much better, his PTSD symptoms eased to almost nothing - he was still plagued by night terrors - which the on-base psychologist ascribed to being with someone he trusted implicitly.

With so little known about the after effects of his possession Stiles was put through trials as Derek tested through basic whilst they tried to decide what to do with the pair of them. That was when it became apparent that Stiles had access to the memories of the being that had possessed him, even if he did not have the knowledge - but he did learn fast.

Stiles attended university and worked with the SGC in a semi official capacity whilst he and Hale were put through rigorous testing although both General O'Neill and General Landry made it clear that all testing was to be voluntary. The one doctor who attempted something was immediately sent to Area 51 with strict instructions that they not return for fear of military prosecution - also fear of Vala who had threatened vivisection - well she threatened to gut him alive and pin him out like a butterfly which Stiles pointed out was called vivisection if the subject was alive after the doctor in question wanted to test the veracity of aconite as poison by introducing it to Hale's food. The general consensus was that Stiles would have cleaned the table and offered her the pins.

Vala Mal Doran was as maternal as a great white shark, and about as dangerous. Stiles turned nineteen under her care and if he had been any younger the chances were that she might not have cared but the idea of having two sons, one of which would happily drink with her whilst watching bad movies and the other who could bench press a car - with ease - pleased her.

April of that year Stiles and Hale returned to Beacon Hills to help with a problem, which the sheriff told General O'Neill was a shitshow of a fiasco made worse by that little fuckwit, not explaining who that little fuckwit was, but they were gone no more than a week - showing up late with Starbucks as Stiles put it and Hale fondly rolled his eyes - but came back "twitchy".

The following weeks Hale admitted that Stiles, with whom he shared off base accomodation which Hale paid for, wasn't sleeping and wasn't eating and whatever had happened in Beacon Hills, about which they were cagy, had exacerbated whatever was wrong.

The second possession lasted two days, Stiles woke up, missed class, which he never did, and drove directly to the mountain where he gained entry. He made his way towards the stargate where attempt was made to tranquilise him but it failed. He was bodily stopped despite being able to fling marines out of the way with his mind. He was restrained and moved to medical where he caused more havoc. Hale provided a powerful paralytic which he called "kanima venom" not explaining either what it was or where he had acquired it but it was clear that it would not last. It served only to paralyse Stiles and then nowhere near long enough whilst many ancient technologies came online including the stargate and Daniel Jackson attempted to converse with the previously thought-dead ancient which called itself Balor.

Hale, admitting that he was desperate, used his claws on the back of Stiles neck in order to access his memory, which he admitted had worked the last time to drive Balor out, which opened a second series of questions in regards to the transferral of the mutagen that he carried, memory-walking and shamanistic practices. 

The magic that was in the bite was discovered later but Hale being a natural born lycanthrope, where the previous bondmate had been infected - or transformed - created a bond, or seal, where Hale's proximity kept Balor in a form of hibernation. Stiles still had night terrors and complained of other complaints, but was mostly healthy, and he had heightened access to Balor's memories.

He could not remember incidents on command, but he understood technology and could activate or in some cases mend it. He also pushed his relationship, such as it was, with Dr Jackson beyond repair and caused Dr Jackson to threaten resignation and to take his books with him. 

During his entire tenure at the SGC Daniel Jackson had been working on a translation of an obscure Ancient dialect which he thought might be a cajun with Furling and was the only remaining existing example of the Furling language. With the nature of his work and other problems he had a blackboard on an easel with half of the text. He left his office door open as Stiles left the medbay he saw the blackboard and, trying to be helpful, translated the entire thing.

Dr Jackson was not impressed because Stiles had not just translated it, he had corrected a lot of the existing translations, scribbled them down on the whiteboard which Dr Jackson used like a rosetta stone. That meant that a good deal of the translations that he had done in his entire career now needed to be corrected.

Stiles and Hale were sent to Antartica where it was decided that their skills could be best put to use in the old outpost. Stiles, within two hours of landing in the outpost managed to open several doors that they had not known were there and tripled the size of the base. By general consensus he was not to be allowed in the "chair" after Colonel Sheppard tried to shoot down General O'Neill the first time he sat in it. With Stiles documented and medicated ADHD it was agreed he would probably blow up the planet.

It turned out that he didn't need to be able to access the chair to be far too dangerous to be left in a military outpost because he started to open storehouses of weapons that were ATA compliant, including one stave weapon that fired energy blasts and extended from a baton to a quarterstaff. It appeared to be a more advanced and energy efficent version of the Go'a'uld staffs.

The IOA became incredibly interested in Stiles and his capacity to find weapons that would have international consequence and the SGC, who answered to the IOA but didn't trust them, had closed door meetings and agreed that the most valuable place for Stiles and his knowledge was Atlantis, which was a scientific outpost and was in another galaxy where if he blew up a planet it wouldn't affect them, and prevented him from being taken by the Trust who would appreciate having an ancient in the misguided belief that they could control and weaponise him, almost certainly by threatening Hale.

Trying to explain the bond between Stiles and Hale, and how they could not be apart for more than twelve hours without catastrophe, Dr Lee had used the term th'y'la which was when one person carried part of the soul of another which allowed Dr McCoy resurrect Spock in the Star Trek movie series. A series that Stiles made Hale watch during their journey on the Daedalus, a ship made of Asgard tech that he couldn't influence.

Dr Jackson, given the name Balor, wrote a thesis on Earth mythology around the Ancient which caused a lot of frustration because the ancient Romans had done their best to stamp it out, which, with what Dr Jackson knew about the gods of mythology and how many of them turned out to be real, theorised might have been a deliberate attempt to disempower the trapped ancient. 

Without Stiles to frustrate him he also managed to track Balor as a prisoner and how the wolf guard was set to watch him even if Derek himself had no idea of the history but Balor had ascended and was defeated and bound to an oak tree, as the area faced persecution which threatened the tree a ritual was done to move the ancient from one to another where it was replanted. He was able to track it through Europe until he escaped in Gevaudan possessing a man called Sebastian Valet, information from Beacon Hills told of how a group of parapsychologists using ancient and asgard tech tried to resurrect Valet not understanding how it had been Balor who was responsible for the Gevaudan beast killings - accounts of which ranged from two hundred to ten thousand- had recreated a facsimile of the ancient which possessed a local youth [not Stiles]. 

The tree that the ancient was bound to was called a Nemeton and it caused the SGC to start looking much more closely at existing trees, the one in Beacon Hills was cut down in 1977 and the priests of Balor had control of the local lycanthropes.

The mythology was Celtic and had been suppressed, but it seemed before people were brought to Earth there were two races, the Sidhe and the Formorians, Balor was Formorian. He was a fearsome warrior with a doomsday weapon called "the Eye" but very little information in regards to the Eye remained but it sounded like a death ray which could boil rivers and burn rivers just with a look in their direction but Balor kept hooded and it took several people to open the lid to reveal the Eye. 

A prophecy existed that Balor would be killed by his grandson and so he locked away his daughter, Ethnui, who was seduced in her tower, had a son who killed Balor. 

Most of what interested Dr Jackson was the talk of a war between the Sidhe, which he recognised as ancients, the ascended and non ascended who had seeded the world with people, and the Formorians who it seemed had created the Wraith and several other "abomination" creatures. Hale admitted he had met a kanima, a winged lizard creature that expelled a paralytic venom, a gorgon like creature that caused massive calcification in its victims in a form of petrification, a sluagh which shapeshifted into figures manifested by the guilt of the person seeing it, a wendigo in the woods of Oregon, a rougarou, which behaved like a wendigo but could pass as human, a millenia old fox spirit, and others he had heard of but not seen, providing a bestiary collected by a group of hunters which had, in some cases, genetic evidence where they had smeared blood on the pages.

All of these had military capability, much in the same way that velociraptors did - you could point them in the right direction and a lot of killing would be done, but that didn't mean that they would stop. Balor's Eye would be much more intriguing to military powers as it did seem to be a weapon of mass destruction and the war against the Go'a'uld, the Ori and the Wraith - amongst others - was always fought on a knife edge where total oblivion was prevented and humanity saved by a whisker.

The idea that any kind of weapon with that sort of capability existed and could be in the hands of someone who would use it against Earth was terrifying - but Dr Jackson had been part of the stargate program for over ten years ; in any hands the eye was far too dangerous, and if Stiles had any idea where it was then it was best for everyone involved if he was put out of range of the Eye, or at least in another Galaxy where he was someone else's problem - the SGC had enough problems of its own.

A teenager who possibly had access to a weapon of mass destruction really was much better suited to Atlantis, and removing any evidence of the preternatural from the IOA was just a sweet bonus.

\---

Stiles and Hale had fallen into step with Atlantis like they had always been there. The city sang for Stiles the way it did for Sheppard, if it was perhaps slightly more quick to answer, although perhaps Stiles understood her in a different way to Sheppard for he was sometimes found talking to her and took routes through the city that Sheppard, who had been present since the city was found, wouldn't think to because they were either closed off - doors opened for him even if they had been previously locked - or had been barricaded or flooded.

If she could have brought every flower into bloom for his passing she would have.

Atlantis remembered and Stiles remembered and they shared that rememberance and that was something that Sheppard could not share but it wasn't something that he resented. He and the city had their own relationship, and having Stiles there meant that he was pestered much less by the scientists wanting him to activate thingummies and doodads - technical terms.

Stiles did not actively know what the devices were, but he remembered their use if the memory could be triggered, so McKay waited until he was busy with something which required concentration and went "what's this?" So Stiles would answer that it was something ridiculous and mundane becuase most of the gadgets and gizmos that littered the city were - they did things like clean the drains or, in one example, was a vibrator and even ten thousands years of non-use didn't mean that Dr Kavanagh didn't drop it like it was suddenly red hot and had cooties.

They found a use for him filling in, Derek trained with Teyla and Ronon, he admitted to being scared he might break the marines after one altercation - the marine in question was used to being the biggest and the strongest and wanted to fight everyone to prove this, he chose to start with Derek - and publically was face planted into the dirt outside the Athosian settlement as easily as if Derek was wrestling with leaves.

Derek didn't hurt him but Ronon informed the marine, in no uncertain terms, if he continued with this nonsense then he would split him like kindling. He was sent home on the next Daedalus run.

Derek had a tendency to throw himself into danger because he knew he could heal and the marines couldn't to the extent that Sheppard had to have a word with him about it, but unless Stiles was on the away team - for things like reading panels or mapping ancient ruins - Derek worked much like a handyman, carrying heavy objects, fetching things or running messages. He liked to be busy and if it wasn't for keeping Balor imprisoned he had no purpose on the city.

Teyla was fascinated by the bond that the two of them shared and insisted that she join them in meditation and used traditional elixirs and rituals that allowed them to understand their bond.

She then explained it to the city, where McKay immediately dismissed it as mumbo jumbo but it allowed them to understand at least, in part, what had happened.

Balor had been defeated but for reasons known only to the victors instead of destroying him they bound him and used the "wolf guard" or Tau'vol as jailers. The Tau'vol had the capacity to form bonds which were designed, when the Tau'vol were created, to force an ascended into a physical form, such as a tree, or, in this case, Stiles. That bond was forged when Derek used his nails on the back of Stiles' neck, it allowed them to share what Teyla called a "dreamwalk" which was usually only possible after years of training and relied on wraith genetic material which granted limited telepathy.

Teyla accepted that humanity was capable of great things, things that made no sense to science. McKay bitched about it but agreed there did appear to be evidence.

The time that Derek and Stiles spent together the more they fit into each other like stones worn smooth that when intersected formed a seamless wall. Stiles, who was thriving in Atlantis where he was allowed to be smart and appreciated for the knowledge that he hoarded, seemed to understand when Derek was struggling under the weight of his past or needed to run and would suggest that they go to the mainland or insisted that they needed a mental health day where they would just stay in bed and he'd come back from the mess loaded with pastries and a moka pot he used to make the spicy Horvath tea that Derek preferred from their stores and they'd watch movies and he'd just be silly until Derek laughed and the burden was eased.

The forests of the Athosian mainland were a glorious expanse full of game and wild mushrooms and fruit and Derek would run back and forth, gleeful as a puppy, nipping at Stiles' coat or pants to pull him along as he gathered herbs in a basket, or sticks in a carrier and with the sun on his face and fresh air and laughing at Derek's antics his burden seemed to lighten.

Sex was a natural extension, at first two bodies finding warmth in the Antarctic base that was always a little chilly no matter how many heaters were running, even with the ice as an insulator. Centuries of cold had seeped into the empty spaces and it didn't seem to ease any even with the warm bodies moving through in heavy clothes and constantly running heaters. They pressed together in a slim military cot because two bodies were warmer than one, and somewhere innocent touches between soulmates - they did share a single soul after all - became caresses; became intimate, sharing breaths became sharing kisses, became laughter and shifting limbs became tangled and at some point in a vague transition, they became lovers.

In Atlantis, no one cared if Stiles seemed to know when Derek needed him to reach out and take his hand, although if they did have sex on the conference table during the daily briefing there might have been complaints but both Teyla and Dr Beckett supplied them with a lubricant and asked questions about sexually transmitted diseases that made Derek' ears turn bright red and Stiles to answer nonchalantly that Derek was immune. Dr Beckett's sex pack, a non-descript looking plastic box that he took down from a shelf - he had several kinds depending on need, including one in a green-tinted box that no one had asked for yet which made Stiles ask all manner of questions about what it was for that even he would not ask Dr Beckett - included everything that they might need and several items that they probably wouldn't, ever but were nice to have just in case, and was shoved under their shared bed and that was all that Atlantis had to say about that.

Almost all of the people on the Atlantis expedition were exiles of one sort or another and so no one - with the exception of Marines who never returned - judged. Dr McKay judged but it was based on intelligence and nothing else, and he considered everyone stupid so no one took it personally after the first five or so times. 


End file.
